Shelter Culture

ESP – ENG

Reflections on a Winter Weekend.

It’s still winter, and we’ve been riding all day. Today, we plan to reach one of the many free mountain shelters in the province of Teruel. I had never been to this one before, though I’d heard about it.

It’s in a stunning yet rather inaccessible location, about two kilometres from a quiet, little-travelled road. Despite looking as if it was renovated not too long ago, two signs inside immediately catch our attention:

‘The fireplace is out of service due to vandalism.’

‘This shelter has been closed due to repeated acts of vandalism.’

This same morning, after spending the previous night in another shelter in the area, we collected an entire bag full of towels and tissues left scattered around.

And throughout the day, we’ve come across several spots—right in the middle of nowhere, far from any tourism or recreational activity—where we’ve seen empty soft drink cans seemingly just tossed into the roadside gutter, presumably thrown from a passing vehicle.

These moments make me reflect on how we treat the places we inhabit.
On how little we can expect of ourselves as a species when it comes to preventing the downfall of this fragile blue bubble we’ve been fortunate enough to call home for a few thousand years.

Perhaps these are isolated incidents, statistical outliers that don’t reflect the whole picture. But they are, undeniably, a reflection of the society we live in.

What truly worries me is the thought that we might start seeing this kind of behaviour as normal—not just in mountain shelters but in any environment.

That’s why this article, this collection of thoughts I originally titled ‘Shelter Culture’, could just as well have been called ‘Planet Culture’.

Sometimes I wonder, are we still in time to change things?

What are your thoughts?
(Comments in the Spanish version)

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