It has not been long in coming. The surprising statement, in a very harsh tone, issued by the Spanish Federation of Mountain Sports and Climbingin which he accused four regional federations -Navarra, Asturias, Catalonia and Aragon- of extending “lack of solidarity within the mountaineering community to intolerable levels”, has had a detailed response from the four regional entities most involved in a controversy generated 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 the management of the shelters, its maintenance and improvement. It is not FEDME who does it, which does not manage any. And this means that we are the ones who apply the discounts and, therefore, the ones who have the loss of income for it,” they stress, noting that FEDME has not foreseen in its last two budgets (2021 and 2022) any contribution for shelters and detailing, for example, that the Aragonese federation, “in a normal year”, the volume of discounts applied in its shelters “is around 250,000 euros” while the average annual compensation of the FEDME has been in recent years “of 8,000 euros a year”.
The board of directors led by Alberto Ayora and those of the federations accused by the FEDME -in an agreement to which new territorial entities are being added- will face each other in a few days with the holding of a Assembly of the national federation that appears very tense.
