When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. In the early nineteen-nineties, while Flamini was studying to be a sports instructor, she visited a cave for the first time. She and a friend drove north of Madrid to El Reguerillo, a cavern known for its paleolithic engravings. El Reguerillo was dark but cozy, and inside its walls she experienced an overwhelming sense of love.
After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. But she felt unsatisfied. She experienced an existential crisis. Flamini moved to the Sierra de Gredos, in central Spain, where she worked as a caretaker at a mountain refuge. She became certified in safety protocols for working on tall structures, and she learned first-aid skills, specializing in retrieving people from deep crevices and other perilous locations. Speed and precision were crucial.
They act like a tourniquet. You have twenty minutes to get out. Flamini found her work arduous but satisfying. She had moments of intense intimacy with other people but spent most of her time by herself. She even fell out of touch with her family. Flamini began living in a camper van and loved it, especially in the winter, when the doors occasionally froze shut, leaving her trapped inside until the temperature rose. Twice, thieves tried to break into her camper while she was elsewhere in the mountains.
Flamini, an enthusiastic photographer, was proud of her mountain adventures, and she maintained an Instagram feed full of her exploits in rugged locales.
In one image, she is dangling by a purple guide rope hundreds of feet above a rocky cliff bottom. She enjoyed social-media interactions: she presented herself the way she wished to be and could ignore responses that made her uneasy. When the pandemic arrived, in , Flamini drove her camper to the mountains of Catalonia and set herself up in an abandoned pre-Romanesque hermitage.
