When I Sing, Mountains Dance.

Mar gave me "Canto jo i la muntanya balla" as a Sant Jordi present.

In Catalonia, Sant Jordi is the day of books and roses, when people give each other books, flowers, or both. It is one of the few traditions that still feels very simple and beautiful.

At first, I didn’t really get it.

Or maybe that is not exactly true. I could see there was something there, but I couldn’t enter the book properly. The way it was written felt different. Voices changed. Things spoke. The mountain, the weather, animals, people, ghosts, memories. It didn’t move in a straight line, and at that moment I probably wanted it to.

So I left it on the shelf.

A few months later, Mar and I went to Platja del Senyor Ramon, near Tossa de Mar. We had the book with us, and started playing this game of reading it out loud to each other.

That changed everything.

Hearing it out loud made it easier to connect with the book. Suddenly the rhythm made sense. The voices became less strange. Or maybe they became strange in the right way. I started to understand that the book was not asking to be read like a conventional story. It was asking you to listen.

That day, on the beach, we decided we would finish the book together. Reading it to each other, slowly.

Sadly, we never did it.

A few weeks later, at the beginning of August, I went to the Pyrenees with my friend Kenneth. We were in Benasque, not exactly the same valley where the stories of the book take place, but still inside the Pyrenees. Close enough for the book to start behaving differently.

We stayed at a campsite by the river Ésera, a name that already felt familiar to me. In parallel to Amunt, we also run a creative direction and graphic design studio, and one of the projects we are working on is the climbing guidebook for Benasque. Almost every climbing sector in that guide is connected, in one way or another, by the Ésera river, running through the valley from north to south.

There was a flat rock in the middle of the river, and I kept going there with the book. At first, I think I was going there more to calm down than to read. I was not feeling very good at the time, and I liked the idea of that rock: water moving on both sides, the noise of the river, the mountains around it, and me trying to be quiet for a while. The book slowly started to stay with me.

And there, I read the whole thing.

This time I didn’t struggle with it. I didn’t try to control it too much. I just let it move. One voice after another. People, mountains, storms, mushrooms, dogs, women, ghosts, the memory of violence, the small life of a village, the large life of a landscape.

What I like about Irene Solà’s book is that the mountain is not treated as decoration. It is not a nice background for human drama. It is alive, noisy, full of things. It has its own memory. Its own language. Its own bad mood.

That feels very true to me.

When you spend time outside, especially in the mountains, you understand very quickly that you are not the centre of anything. You are just passing through. The weather does not care about you. The river does not care about you. The rocks don’t care either. But somehow, if you pay attention, everything starts to feel connected.

This book has that feeling, to me.

It is not a book about outdoor sports. It is not about performance, adventure, routes or summits. It is much better than that. It is about place. About how a landscape is made of everything that has happened there: animals, people, stories, death, language, work, fear, desire, weather, silence.

It is also a book that made me think about how we talk about mountains.

Sometimes the outdoor world speaks about nature in a very clean way. Too clean, maybe. Big views, nice light, good equipment, the idea of escape. But the mountain is not only beautiful. It is also uncomfortable, brutal, funny, dirty, magical, boring, violent, generous, indifferent. All at the same time.

"Canto jo i la muntanya balla" understands that.

It has mud in it. It has blood. It has humour. It has rain. It has women speaking, animals speaking, dead people speaking, clouds speaking. And somehow it doesn’t feel forced. It feels like the book is simply admitting something we usually forget: that a place is never silent. We are just not always listening.

That is probably why I wanted to recommend it through Amunt.

Because Amunt is an outdoor clothing project, yes, but the outdoors for us is not only about clothes. It is also about how we look at places. How we move through them. How we remember them. How a mountain can be something physical, emotional and cultural at the same time.

This book sits very close to that.

It also reminded me that sometimes you don’t find a book at the right moment. Sometimes it needs a beach, someone reading next to you, a river in the Pyrenees, and a flat rock where you can sit long enough for it to finally make sense.

This book was given to me by Mar.

We started reading it together, and I finished it alone by the river. I thought about her a lot while reading it. About the "mountains" we had shared, and about how some landscapes stay attached to certain people.

That is what happened to me.

And I knew, before closing it, that it would be my next recommendation for Approach.

Martí Canillas
Creative Director and Co-founder of Amunt