It was not long in coming. The surprising statement, in a very harsh tone, issued by the Spanish Federation of Mountaineering and ClimbingIn which he accused four regional federations – Navarre, Asturias, Catalonia and Aragon – of extending “lack of solidarity within the mountaineering community to intolerable levels”, there was a detailed response from the four regional entities most involved in a controversy caused by the agreement of ‘Mutual Refuge Correspondence’ promoted by these four federations to improve management and offer discounts to their members.
After initially criticizing the tone of the FEDME statement “with an offensive aspect, even insulting in some of the terms used”, the FNDME and its three partners in the refugee agreement assure that the problem with the shelters “is neither philosophical nor political nor territorial nor solidarity… It is an economic problem!” They explain in their writing.
“We are the Armed Forces who have the responsibility for managing the shelters, its maintenance and improvement. It is not FEDME that does this, nor any management. And this means that we are the ones who apply the discount and therefore the ones who have the loss of income for it,” they emphasize, noting that FEDME did not provide any contribution for shelters in its last two budgets (2021 and 2022) and describes for example that the Aragonese federation, “in a normal year”, the volume discount applied in its shelters “is about 250,000 euros” while the average annual compensation of the FEDME in recent years “was of 8,000 euros year “.
The board of directors led by Alberto Ayora and that of the federations accused by the FEDME – in an agreement to which new territorial entities are added – will face each other in a few days with the holding of a Meeting of the national federation which appears very tense.
