Around 2011, the Nau Côclea Contemporary Art Centre entered a moment of crisis, and so did I. It was not only a question of funding. I was also concerned with questions of format and with the relationship between audiences, artists and artworks, a relationship too often reduced to mere consumption.

At the centre, people moved through exhibitions with a highly social attitude, looking here and there, often chatting, somewhat distracted. Their experiences rarely reached moments of intensity or intimacy. To “consume” is not the same as engaging in art. And to consume art quickly does not allow one to grasp either the tempo or the soul of the works. Something had to be done. Out of this urgency, the idea of the Grand Tour emerged.

That is indeed how the project began. It arose from the need to open another way, more available, more permeable, of relating to artistic creation, of allowing oneself to be affected by art.
But this is only the beginning of the story, because the Grand Tour has brought many other surprises.

The Grand Tour is an artistic project by the Nau Côclea Contemporary Art Centre in Camallera (Catalonia), which I direct. It consists of a walk of around 250 kilometres with people and artists of many kinds: musicians, storytellers, visual and live artists, dancers, writers and poets. The journey begins on a summer day and unfolds over approximately three weeks. Each day the group walks between 15 and 25 km, accompanied by an artist or a collective who has prepared a proposal.

The route draws a spiral across the territory, crossing urban and rural areas, natural landscapes, coastal paths and mountain trails. Both while walking and at stopping points, artists unfold their interventions (poetry, dance, installations…), day and night.

The journey is open and flexible: one can walk the entire route, just a few days, or simply arrive at a meeting point and take part in an action. Each person can join or leave at any moment, adapting the journey to their own possibilities.

We began this format in 2015, and we have now been walking for twelve years. We have travelled across Catalonia, southern France and Aragón. We have crossed and stepped over borders, bathed in the sea, in rivers, streams and the coldest lakes of the Pyrenees. We have lived through drought and now floods. We have entered Barcelona through its most industrial edges and left it through its most gentrified beaches, and we have also come to know the most depopulated areas of the Aragonese strip.

Each summer, a group of artists and walkers sets out, crossing landscapes that are never quite the same, even when we return to them. Everywhere, we have been welcomed by local communities, artists, activists, ecofeminists, and also by people who resist classification, who, precisely for that reason, inhabit the margins of the territory and its most remote rural areas.

In 2026, the twelfth edition takes a slight turn. Not bigger, not further, not more spectacular, but more attentive. This year we focus on three routes, chosen from among those that have marked us most over these twelve years. There are places we want to return to: for the extraordinary beauty of their landscapes, for the unexpected discoveries of a territory that is no longer unfamiliar, or for the communities who inhabit them and have welcomed us with a disarming hospitality.

At the same time, we recognise the importance of gathering what has happened along the way. Not to fix it, but to hold it: images, fragments, voices, traces. Video, photography, writing, but also conversations, gestures, ways of being together that only exist while walking. After so much lived experience, a need emerges to document memory and make it more transmissible.

With this in mind, this year the Grand Tour is divided into three stages drawn from previous journeys. There will be less exploration, but instead a joyful return to places and moments lived, with the awareness that each turn of the spiral offers a different situation.

In truth, all journeys would deserve such a gesture, but since we cannot revisit them all, we have chosen three: the Eastern Pyrenees on the border between the French and Spanish states, the Aragonese strip (an internal border between autonomous communities), and the Ebro Delta.

The Pyrenees: the accidental border

The first route (August 23–30) takes us to the Eastern Pyrenees. We will set out from Céret, near Canigó, and reach the highest mountains and the sources of the River Ter.

We will move between the border of France and Spain almost without noticing. Vallespir, the upper Ter, names that may sound distant, but on foot become material: stone, wind, cliffs, scree slopes.

Here we walk with people who have long been accomplices and co-creators of the project, as the route is entrusted to the collective Deriva Mussol, who will define its artistic line. With Jordi Lafon and Montsita Rierola, we will undertake a journey of photography, dance and music.

It is no coincidence that we begin in Céret: together with our friends at the Lumière d’Encre Photography Centre, we are currently working on a cross-border photographic observatory focused on the Tech and Muga rivers.

Azucena Momo, choreographer and poet, and Ramon Villegas, actor, will join us with voice and body. Momo, an artist close to Nau Côclea, has recently settled at the foot of Canigó, in a small village in the French region of Occitaine. Ramon Villegas has taken part in one of the Walter Benjamin routes that we have been organising for fifteen years. Both bring reflection and lightness, reminding us that walking can also be play, from the plains to the peaks.

Aragón: where communities are reborn

The second part of the journey takes us south-west (September 2–9), to the Aragonese pre-Pyrenees. It is a lesser-known territory, and that is part of its strength.

In the 1960s, people were forced to leave these areas, pushed out by drought, agricultural industrialisation, lack of opportunities and poor connections. Now, however, communities are re-emerging with a spirit that challenges the classical idea of progress.

Nature reclaimed what had been abandoned. It is a wide, silent land, at times almost empty. But nature here is exuberant, generous, overflowing, full of plants and animals that have quietly taken back spaces lost elsewhere.

Villages appear and disappear. Some still inhabited, others slowly receiving newcomers from many places. Here, repopulation does not come through infrastructure or speed, but through stubborn gestures: someone restoring a house, someone opening a space, someone deciding to stay.

We will walk with Beatriz Aisa, geographer and artist, who settled in the area some time ago and is particularly sensitive to these landscapes. She reads them not only as physical spaces but as layers of memory and projection. With her, maps are never just maps.

We will also meet again those locals who sustain a life oscillating between celebration and resistance: Javier at the Molino de Centenera, Adriana Matzurytin in an open meadow at the foot of Turbón. Moving south, we will encounter the Trapusteros, puppeteers who repopulated Aguinaliu and turned it into a small theatrical village of forty inhabitants. Here the question shifts. It is no longer “where are we going?” but “what does it mean to remain?”

The Ebro Delta: where the river ends, everything opens

The final route (October 12–18) takes us to the Ebro Delta. After the mountains, the flatlands. Water everywhere. Rice fields, migratory birds, shifting light, endless horizons.

In this wetland everything moves. The land loses its heaviness. Daily life is demanding, yet festive. In the Delta one breathes — sometimes in tension — siesta, struggle, celebration, ecological concern and sometimes, isolation.

In Santa Bàrbara, writer and journalist Anna Zaera will welcome us to the Rihihiu festival, dedicated to song and women’s voices.

Miquel Àngel Marín, born in the heart of the Delta, will once again recite the names of the irrigation channels where he played as a child, accompanied by a saxophone that speaks more than it sings.

For her love of the land and her sense of humour we have also invited Núria Martínez-Vernis, a radical poet and performer who, together with Jordi Rallo, has at times been the cook of the journey. Núria’s poetry is pure life, pure oral transmission, where doing prevails over writing. With her, as well as with Rallo, things rarely remain where they were supposed to.

…and we keep walking

Grand Tour 2026 gathers paths that are still very much alive. It brings people together again, not to repeat what has already happened, but to consolidate and celebrate what remains open.

Walking does not accumulate, it transforms. And even when we return, we are always at a new starting point.

Dedicating this twelfth year to hosts and friends, to the walkers who have accompanied us year after year, to the animals, lands and waters we already know, is an important gesture. We look back, yes, and follow the trace we have drawn over the years with our feet, but not to repeat it rather to move forward.