KNOW THE EXPEDITION
ANDREU LÓPEZ CASTELLANO,
THE DRIVER
22 / 193
CONQUERED SUMMITS
I am someone who has always been linked to sporting activity. Attracted by challenges and always open to exploring new countries and territories as well as meeting and sharing with people that I find in the “Top Summits of the World” project a perfect space to encompass everything.
“Top Summits of the World” represents for me a powerful, large-scale, dynamic, exciting project… or it could be more than a project, THE PROJECT represents for me. It is not just another project, it is a major project that has to take me to the top of all the 193 countries in the world, a project that is added to a long list of previous projects of peaks and journeys that have inspired me.
Born in the beautiful and small town of Sant Martí de Tous (Barcelona) I am an economist by profession and since 2018 I have had my own company, Senders Financers SL, through which I practice my profession on my own. The name gives me away, not being able to avoid in the “baptism” of the company a parallelism with one of my great passions: “hiking”.
However, hiking is not a sport that has always been present in my life. My beginnings are characterized by an important relationship with soccer, going through the lower categories of CF Igualada and in the “amateur” stage, going on to play in the team of my town, UE Tous. My football career did not last long and at the age of 24 I opted to “hang up my boots” to gain time freedom and abandon the ties, especially on weekends, that football implies.
A stage of investigation of soccer substitutes begins. After an unsuccessful and fleeting test with tennis, I find a perfect space in the “long-distance journeys” that allow me to combine sporting activity with discovering new places, territories and people. Very soon I discover that this activity is very good for me, with increasingly better results in races until I achieved 2nd place in the “Marxa dels Castells” de Cervera, edition of the year ’12 (54 km).
A very strange and undiagnosed injury to my right ankle appeared in my life on March 12 and stopped me completely. For years I have experienced a traumatic problem when I went from running for hours and hours without ceasing, to not being able to walk for more than 5 minutes and having to live with bodily pain for many years and with absolutely no forecast of their remission or cure. the injury.
“We fall to get up”, this is one of the “mantras” of my person in which the word surrender does not enter my dictionary, it is a taboo word. In this process of recovery, of infinite trial and error in the investigation of recovering health… I discover a powerful ally in nature and it gives me a lot of energy and enthusiasm to promote my first hiking project, which is the project of the “100 Summits for Catalonia”. As the summits progress, and after falling and getting up multiple times along the way, I am recovering my health and with it my possibilities in “hiking”.
The project of the 100 summits was succeeded by others such as the “50 perspectives of the Pyrenees” as well as these would alternate with routes of several days such as the “Camí de Ronda GR-92”, “Carros de Foc”, “Cavalls de Vent” , “Camí de Cavalls”, “Serra de Tramontana” as well as beyond our borders some of the toughest and spectacular paths in the world such as the “GR-20 de Córcega” or the “Diagonal de Fous” in the Reunion Island among others.
And among so many routes around the world, paths, trips and summits, the summit of Teide and its 3,718 meters appears, as well as a vision, a union of points… to unite the world through the highest level of all its countries. The first stone of the “TOP SUMMITS OF THE WORLD” project was born and set at 3,718 meters without knowing it.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
