The mountain, our homeland. The moral and touristic use of the Catalan mountain (1877-1936)

Abstract

In Catalonia, hikers primarily discovered their mountains between 1880 and 1936. Conservative political Catalanism found in hikers a decisive lever for the construction of national identity. But so did the Republicans, who linked it to labor movements. It thus functioned as a space for sociability that articulated collective identities and political projects. This article draws on the literature on the subject and engages it with previously unpublished primary sources. The result proposes an approach to the complex phenomenon of Catalan national identity based on the symbolic and material construction of one of its symbols: the mountains.