Nature and Landscape

The Dual Face of the Mountain

Abstract

Why do we admire and climb mountains? To discuss this topic, we begin by explaining the conceptual differences between nature and landscape and how the aesthetic experience of landscape occurs, with the support of the Philosophy of Landscape. Based on the historiography of the landscape and the literature of art, we continue to narrate the historical path of cultural invention of the mountain within the universal imaginary, in which it asserted itself as a double reality, nature and landscape. This condition made it admired and experienced by both their natural attributes and their immaterial and affective values. It also gives to it a strategic value: climbing mountains is both aesthetic and physical experience that incites us to think, enriches our senses and imagination, fundamental to our awareness of the world. Over the mountain, we can see beauty or destruction, and this leads us into ethical positions. The decision, in landscape, is topological.