Kim Calbetó comes out of the kitchen with steaming bowls of veal stew. "Do you want to do it again?", he asks the hikers who will get up early the next day to start the Pass'Aran crossing, between the Val d'Aran and the French department of Ariège. After a hearty dinner, diners take a short walk and go upstairs to rest in this comfortable mountain accommodation. Kim, 48, is the veteran guard of Montgarri, once a small town with just a dozen houses that was depopulated in the middle of the last century. After decades of neglect, in 1998 life began to appear again in this enclave, more than 1,600 meters high, when the refuge was set up in the old rectory.
Kim, who shares the guard job with his colleague Andrés España, has made this secluded place his home. The link with Montgarri was forged in his early childhood. “I took my first steps here, or at least this is what my parents have told me, and it is an idea that I like. As always, every 2 July a pilgrimage is held, perhaps the most massive in the Pyrenees, people come from Pallars, Ribagorza, Val d'Aran, France... 1,500 or 2,000 people gather. And I also participated as a child with my family ”, he recalls one July morning at the end of the breakfast shift and saying goodbye to his guests. Some start the Pass'Aran, others follow sections of the High Pyrenean Route or some variant of the GR-10 or GR-11.
Kim tells us that Montgarri was famous, not so long ago, for being a most inhospitable, wild place and prone to avalanches. A place where one should not go. “People told us that it was dangerous to approach here. In Can Cabau, where the last inhabitant lived, when the snow fell naturally it caused turbulence that even broke the window panes. For this reason, when I came to ski when I was young and when I came back I told it at home, they thought I was crazy. Now everything has changed and in winter there is a significant flow of skiers”, says Kim, satisfied with having turned Montgarri into a cozy home a stone's throw from little-trodden peaks, far from the overcrowding suffered by other mountains.
Being able to live here with his wife and daughter has been possible thanks to the efforts of the Associació Amics de Montgarri to recover the old rectory and consolidate the church, built in the 16th century on a Romanesque hermitage from the 12th. Both buildings are the property of the Bishopric of Urgell, which has ceded them to the aforementioned association for having been involved in their recovery.
“I used to come here in the summers to work on the reconstruction works of the rectory and in 1995, at the age of 19, they asked me and two friends to open a space to serve drinks and snacks to hikers. That was the beginning because I soon decided to leave the Inef studies and I proposed to the Association of Friends to also offer accommodation”. In this way, what would become the current refuge was created in the dependencies of the rehabilitated rectory. In addition to the common rooms, it has a suite with a maximum of four beds for people who are looking for more comforts.
Montgarri, a few meters from the Noguera Pallaresa river and surrounded by pastures, cows and peaks, draws a bucolic postcard. The old stables are in ruins but, in summer, the meadows continue to attract herds from Ribagorza, Lleida, Solsona... “I estimate that these months 1,000, perhaps 1,500 head of cattle are concentrated. Before, until the beginning of 2000, shepherds still lived in the cabins, but now the owners take turns and come every two or three days to check on the animals and give them salt”, he details.
Tourism, encouraged by the landscape and the offer of mountain sports, is the main activity in this corner of the Val d'Aran, a few kilometers from the Baqueira Beret ski resort.
This is one of the starting points of Pass'Aran, the five-day circular itinerary that invites those hikers who still have strength after completing stages that exceed 1,700 meters to ascend the peaks of Barlonguère, Mont Valier, Crabère or Maubèrme. meters of positive slope. The success of the pioneer, the Carros de Foc, in the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park, has led to the creation of new routes in the Pyrenees that, increasingly, engage a greater number of followers.
Kim, together with the guards of the Estagnous and L'Étang d'Arain refuges, and of the accommodations of the Maison du Valier and Eylie, a picturesque village in the Ariège where time seems to have stopped and in which where only two people live permanently, they launched Pass'Aran in 2011. “We wanted to show unknown places of great beauty; the idea is having a good acceptance and has contributed to increasing overnight stays”, she adds.
Here he lives with his partner and his daughter most months of the year, even when communication with the outside world is only viable by snowmobile or skis as the access track from Pla de Beret becomes impassable. Living in Montgarri allows you to ski to your heart's content in solitary corners, in the Tuc de Gurièr, in the port of Orla, in the Malh de Bolard, in the Marimanha valley and in many other areas to discover. He only closes a few months and settles with his family in Vielha. “But when you get used to living in the mountains, you find yourself missing shelter, you have plenty of neighbors and noise. Here we are freer”.
