Marina, the oldest shepherdess in Catalonia
Solanguit (Ripollès), 1927

"I was born among sheep, and sheep give me freedom." So says Marina Vilalta, Catalonia's oldest shepherdess, who at 99 years old has spent almost a century in the mountains, at the slow pace of her flock.

Born in 1927 in Solanguit, a small hamlet in Ripollès, she began tending sheep at a very young age. She tried working nights in a factory but quit almost immediately: sleeping during the day felt like an offense to nature. When she married, she moved to Can Sibí, in Bruguera—a village of barely fifty inhabitants—and since then, she has never stopped taking her sheep to graze.

She looks after a modest flock of about fifty sheep ("the animals of the poor," she calls them) and three dogs, commensurate with the land she owns. To be a shepherd, she explains, you truly have to love animals, the mountains, and solitude. She has only left Catalonia once: she took a plane to Mallorca to fulfill an old dream, to fly, like the eagles she has so often seen soaring over the peaks.

Shrewd, ironic, and with a mind as clear as ever, Marina hasn't needed much to be happy: her sheep, her mountain, and her patch of land. She has always lived exactly as she wanted, true to her way of doing things. "I'm happy with my sheep," she says. And perhaps that is her great secret: having learned that freedom can be as simple as a flock and a mountain path.