On 26 February 2010 we registered a website called runningcostabrava.com. Two people, one destination, no clients. That is the date NomaTrails starts from, and it is why 2026 is our sixteenth year.
But the story does not start there. It starts about two years earlier, in a bed in the Josep Trueta hospital in Girona, at the worst moment of our lives.
The hospital
Pablo woke up from back surgery that would keep him lying down for a month. Our two boys were small — Adrià and Andreu — and Cristina was seven months pregnant with twins. A month before the operation he had been told that his job in IT was gone. It was the beginning of 2008, and the recession was arriving.
Nothing about it looked like the start of a company.
What changed the direction was a conversation. Cristina’s parents, Quim and Marissa, had been on a mountain-bike tour through the Pyrenees, and they talked about it. The thing that stayed was not the route. It was the realisation that being in the mountains could be somebody’s job.
That mattered because of what had come before. In his youth Pablo had been a professional triathlete, and a knee injury at the wrong moment was all that stood between him and representing Costa Rica, his own country, at the 2000 Olympics. Sport had always been something you competed in. Lying in that bed, for the first time, it became something you could explore in — and be paid to show other people.
Asked about it years later, in an interview filmed in 2015, he put the change in one line:
“I have an experience in a race I did many years ago when I missed one of the most beautiful parts of the race because I was racing. And that taught me a lot.”
He could not do much with the thought for a while. He had a family to feed and had to find another IT job. But it did not go away.
Cristina tells this part herself, and she tells it shorter: he came home one day and said he was going to leave IT and start his own company. That is true of the decision. It took another two years to become true of the facts.
Two years of finding work and losing it
First he had to get out of the bed. The month flat on his back became a longer convalescence, and only after that could he look for work at all. He found it — and then the crisis arrived properly and took it away again. That became the pattern: find a job, lose a job, find a job. Twice the company he was working for either folded or let almost everyone go. In the middle of all that the twins were born, Andreu turned four and Adrià turned six.
Then came a well-paid post as an IT consultant in Barcelona. On paper it was the answer. In practice it took the first train at six in the morning and brought him home after eleven at night, and he saw Cristina and his four children essentially at weekends, by which point he was too burnt out to be much good to them. His children have always been his hobby. His family has always been the reason for the effort. There was not much point to any of it if he never saw them.
A job at Garage Andreu, a car dealership in Girona, brought him home. And he asked his new boss for one favour: if my job is ever at risk, tell me early.
By then Cristina and he had already made the decision privately. They were going to try. She has always been the one pushing him to go, to attempt it, to grow.
So the day the news came that the company was letting half its staff go, it was not another day of dread. It was the day. The world was there, the will was at its peak, and the only option left was the one they actually wanted.
A pair of shoes
The next morning he went to Decathlon and bought his first pair of running shoes in years. The surgeon who had operated on his back had told him he would never run again.
There is nothing quite like having no other choice to make you try your dreams out. He had been walked to the edge of a cliff and needed to work out how to fly, quickly. With four small children at home, Cristina pushed him off it.
Two dates
22 December 2009 — we registered the travel agency, Runcosbra Girona S.L.
26 February 2010 — we registered what would become NomaTrails under its first name, runningcostabrava.com.
Only the two of us know how much hope was stacked up in that second date.
Cristina is from Girona, beside the Empordà coast — the Costa Brava, as the tourists call it. The reason the company could exist at all is that we did not have to go anywhere to start it. The scenery was already there, half an hour from the kitchen table.
Sixteen years, and how a destination earns its place
The company has widened since, but never outside the family it came from.
NomaTrails was born in Girona, where Cristina was born. The second place we ran was Costa Rica, because that is Pablo’s country — and the greatest gift of all was getting our children their Costa Rican nationality too. Chance took us to southern Morocco, where one turn of fate introduced us to Abdu Oukioud, and another introduced us to Driss, who became our son: the fifth, and the eldest. Our tie to Morocco is not a commercial one. The Pyrenees are Catalonia as well. Sicily took three years of effort, and Pablo has been paying his respects to it by learning Italian.
Not one of those places was added to NomaTrails for commercial reasons. Each one became part of our life first. Only then did we feel we had the right to show it to anybody else.
That is the whole business model, if we are honest about it. We learn the language, we earn the affection of the people who live there, and then we take you running through their trails.
Where to go next
The full sixteen-year timeline, with the dates and the trips, is on our history page. Every destination we run is on running tours, and all the current departures are on the calendar.
Pablo and Cristina
Written with Aluenda Smeeton.
