Four boys line up on the trail, fast, at a brisk pace. Too fast to be a team that is turning the mountain, too slow to be athletes who went to the mountains to run. They don’t have mountain boots on their feet, they don’t wear thermal T-shirts and they don’t wear gore-tex to protect themselves from the rain. They wear street clothes, clean shoes and jeans; their skin is black, as black as the night we just left behind. They are Aden, Abdoulaye, Ibrahima and Oumar, four youngsters from Conakry Guinea. FOur ilegal migrants crossing the Spanish-French border.

Those four men don’t know it, but they aren’t the first ones using these paths to cross the border clandestinely. British pilots, smugglers, those who were fleeing Francoism, and Portuguese migrants have walked these paths before themselves. From south to north and from north to south. They are repeatedly burned paths, corners that are very well guarded by the police at different times; but which have been repeatedly recovered to cross the border. It is necessary to give time to the burning path, to let it fall into oblivion… Suddenly it will blossom and it will be possible for someone to use it to cross the border. Until it gets burned again.