The perfect pyramid of Gasherbrum IV seemed to come to life when the sun touched it
Sebastián Álvaro, ‘My mountains’
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Sebastián Álvaro (74) tells me:
–Interestingly, my neighborhood as a child was called Campamento (in Madrid).
(And this is how this man who is a mountaineer, adventurer and journalist, has spent, and still spends, his life: from one camp to the other).
–The neighborhood is called that, Campamento, because my grandfather, its founder, named it. So, in those years of the Civil War, there were military camps there. According to my father, who was a farmer, the quality of that land was so bad that not even chickpeas could be planted. Now, Madrid players and financiers live there in houses worth five million euros.
-And you?
–I am happy in the mountains. I’m retired now, but I work more than before.
Sebastián Álvaro, during an ascent of Mount Scott, in 2018
and tells me about my mountains (Anaya Touring publishing house), selection of fifteen adventures that have marked his life and the career of On the edge of the impossiblethe program he directed for more than thirty years for RTVE: his experience on tops of the world, rivers, caves, in places as beautiful as they are magical and mysterious.
–Now I am promoting the book. Barcelona, Santiago, Reinosa, Madrid, Zamora, Cuenca, Pamplona, Bilbao are on my agenda… But when all this is over, I’m going to Pakistan. That is wonderful. There is no telephone connection except for the satellite, which I only use to talk to my wife.
–And how is she doing?
–Carmen is a journalist like me. So he handles it well. What went wrong, at the time of On the edge of the impossible (from 1982 to 2008), were the accidents. In thirty years I have lost 33 close friends.
–On those expeditions, you must have had very good and very bad times…
–Carmen never told me that I didn’t save when I returned from my first expedition, the Hidden Peak in 1981. I was tired, I already had a stable job on television, Carmen was pregnant… The possibility of dying was very high. I should have said no but I said yes and that changed my life.
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–In what sense?
–When we returned home, we realized that some shots were missing. I stayed in Madrid but a couple of colleagues returned to Hidden Peak to film them, and they died there. I don’t know if Carmen sensed that something would happen.
Today there are 8.5 million hikers in Spain. “If we formed a party, we would win the elections.”
–And what had moved you to get lost in the mountains?
–When I joined RTVE, at the beginning of the seventies, I worked as a technician. Then, the entity grew disproportionately. I handled cameras, made sound and edited videos while studying Journalism. In 1981 I was offered to join an expedition to the Himalayas.
–And why did they offer it to you?
–I was a mountaineer since I was nine years old. Nothing, simple things. A Montblanc, little more… But he had also made a short film about the world of mountains.
–And you didn’t doubt it?
–I didn’t do it then, much less as the years went by. I never imagined that the program would reach the levels of popularity it did. And that was good, because it forced me to make an increasingly better program. By On the edge of the impossible 2,000 people have passed between cameras, navigation and mountaineering experts, scriptwriters… Chapters are still being replaced.
–I have seen some. They look current.
–The documentaries have aged well. They are fifty-minute stories in which we will get you hooked. We extract the reflections of a human being on the edge, we tell you what happens inside. That is important today, when everything is a false record consumed in a minute. We have two Waves, the National Medal of Sports, Military Merit, the Civil Guard… Today there are 8.5 million hikers in Spain. If we formed a political party, we would win the elections.
–They created a boom!
–We create awareness. The man and the earth He did it in nature. We, in culture. We connect with the modern European current of thought. We are one of the most supportive countries, a world leader in organ transfers, being a small country, with an extraordinary level of environmental awareness. It is a shame that this awareness, unfortunately, is not reflected in Congress.
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