About us
A passion to Share
Odysgea is the personal project of Diego Martín Cortés and his family to share his way of understanding travel and landscape enjoyment after 30 years of experience in the travel sector. After having designed, sold,operated and guided hundreds of tours around the world, mainly for British Tour Operators, now is the time to focus on sharing my own personal land and the experiences and people I have learnt to value along the years.
With a background on Geography and History and a career combining the travel sector with the conservation sector, I now live in the foothills of the Pyrenees with my family, still enjoying the things I have always loved: landscapes, wildlife, culture, mountain sports… and people to share them with!
30 years of experience
An early passion for mountains took me to the world of hiking and climbing, and the need to understand the landscapes I loved took me to study Geography, which gave me a way of looking and enjoying the landscapes of the world and became the main tool to interpret and share these with others.
I started guiding hiking clubs in my early twenties to the mountains surrounding Madrid, but a gap year spent working as volunteer park ranger in the Torres del Paine National Park (Chilean Patagonia) opened a new playground for me. After a few years guiding up and down Patagonia for a Chilean Tour Operator I started to work for the British company Across the Divide Expeditions as guide and expedition leader in destinations as varied as Nepal, Uzbekistan, China, Namibia, Marruecos, Lapland and various Latin American countries ( Chile, Argentina, Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brasil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, México).
At the same time in 2000 I founded with two other partners the British tour operator Pura Aventura, dedicated to tailor-made private tours in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. We created a strong concept of holiday combining experiences in Nature (mainly hiking) with the opportunity to share with the locals and adding a high standard of small hotels and excellent foodie experiences. In twenty years I covered the whole spectrum of tasks from guide to Director, but my time was spent mainly around guiding, product design and operations, as well as B2B sales to American and Australian Tour Operators.
On top of this dedication to the Travel Business, I have tried to develop other projects in the world of Environmental Conservation and Rural Development, mainly working for the Bearded Vulture conservation project in the Picos de Europa and Pyrenees mountains. My main role on this field has been to promote the recognition and survival of the traditional human activities beneficial for the conservation of biodiversity.
Today I want to dedicate my time to facilitating the type of travel experiences I believe are good both for the visitor and the destination, at the same time that I keep on enjoying the mountains, its wildlife and culture and the promotion of Geography as a great tool to understand, share and protect the landscapes I love.
An early passion for mountains took me to the world of hiking and climbing, and the need to understand the landscapes I loved took me to study Geography, which gave me a way of looking and enjoying the landscapes of the world and became the main tool to interpret and share these with others.
I started guiding hiking clubs in my early twenties to the mountains surrounding Madrid, but a gap year spent working as volunteer park ranger in the Torres del Paine National Park (Chilean Patagonia) opened a new playground for me. After a few years guiding up and down Patagonia for a Chilean Tour Operator I started to work for the British company Across the Divide Expeditions as guide and expedition leader in destinations as varied as Nepal, Uzbekistan, China, Namibia, Marruecos, Lapland and various Latin American countries ( Chile, Argentina, Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brasil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, México).
At the same time in 2000 I founded with two other partners the British tour operator Pura Aventura, dedicated to tailor-made private tours in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. We created a strong concept of holiday combining experiences in Nature (mainly hiking) with the opportunity to share with the locals and adding a high standard of small hotels and excellent foodie experiences. In twenty years I covered the whole spectrum of tasks from guide to Director, but my time was spent mainly around guiding, product design and operations, as well as B2B sales to American and Australian Tour Operators.
On top of this dedication to the Travel Business, I have tried to develop other projects in the world of Environmental Conservation and Rural Development, mainly working for the Bearded Vulture conservation project in the Picos de Europa and Pyrenees mountains. My main role on this field has been to promote the recognition and survival of the traditional human activities beneficial for the conservation of biodiversity.
Today I want to dedicate my time to facilitating the type of travel experiences I believe are good both for the visitor and the destination, at the same time that I keep on enjoying the mountains, its wildlife and culture and the promotion of Geography as a great tool to understand, share and protect the landscapes I love.
our passion to share
Share our knowledge, our experience, our point of view and our friends to allow each traveller to create their own landscape, built from your experience. We are proud to call ourselves facilitators of your experience, we like to interpret what we see, to combine a constant attitude of questioning ourselves about the events that created the beauty we admire with the pause to just sense the beauty that surrounds us. To achieve this, we follow these guidelines:
We understand a destination as a whole, a blend of its nature, its history and its culture.
We believe in Heritage Interpretation as the best tool to share our landscapes and culture and enhance your travel experience, thus we will promote guided activities on your tours even when doing a self guided tour. Guides not only interpret Heritage but are also the best insight into
today´s life at your destination.
We believe meaningful experiences happen when we allow time for it, thus we promote a pace of travel that allows deeper experiences and memories instead of collecting post-card moments. Allow the magic of travel to happen.
We believe that each trip is different and we aim to taylor each experience to provide the combination that best suits each particular person or group. To achieve this, we listen, we propose, we keep our mind open, we are honest.
We believe in quality as the reference to all our services and their value. We don´t understand quality as an equivalent to luxury or expensive. We aim for quality from a picnic to a top accommodation.
We believe Luxury in travel is not related to material items but to the opportunity to experience things that only a few can experience.
Our Respect for Nature and People
-We believe that travelling, being in contact with nature and sharing with other people and cultures, can have a massive positive impact in individuals, communities and the conservation of natural environments. But we also have to be conscious of the potential damage of travel and accept our responsibility to minimize these negative effects and boost the positive ones. To achieve this, we follow these guidelines:
-We believe in reducing the CO2 emissions of our travels with less trips a year but for longer periods.
-We believe in including local environmental and cultural projects as part of the travelling experience.
-We believe in supporting local environmental and cultural projects and facilitating our travellers to support them too.
-We believe in working with small local business that promote healthy rural communities.
-We believe in fair business relations with our partners. We don´t want the higher commission, we want the higher standard of service and their passion to facilitate the best experience to our clients.
-We believe in promoting local sustainable products in our tour meals as one of the most positive inputs tourism can have in the destinations.
-We believe in avoiding high season or crowded iconic destinations. Our local expertise should add the value to offer alternatives of the same beauty where you can have a better experience.
-We believe in moderation when enjoying local cultures so we avoid turning them into tourist attractions. A morning with a shepherd can be a top unique experience, but if we take visitors to share time with a shepherd every week this becomes a show for tourists.
Our Respect for the people we work with
-We work for and with people, and we do this with the maximum respect for their time and their interests.
-Every client enjoying one of our holidays is unique to us. Our clients safety, well-being and satisfaction is our main concern. We are here to facilitate the best possible experience, and to do so, we listen, we advise and we are as flexible as we can.
-We also work with many partners on both ends of the bussiness: partner companies that trust us to design and operate tours for their clients and service suppliers on the ground.
-Our relation with other companies is based on trust, care, diligence and open communication. We value the confidence that our partners put on us when they send us their clients, and we honor it with our best effort.
-Our relation with ground service suppliers such as guides, drivers or hotels is based on developing a strong relation that can last for years, based on trust and fare rates. We pride ourselves to call friends many of our ground suppliers.
Diego Martín
Founder & General Manager
I love designing personalized itineraries, finding other guides that share my vision of hosting and sharing also guide once in a while to keep in touch with the experiences in the ground and share the places I love. I would love to contribute with my work to the preservation of the places I love.
Ph : (+34) 647 75 11 05
Maria Jiménez
Operations Manager, Environmental Education and Design
I love working with a network of partners formed by guides, hotels, restaurants, drivers, etc, get to know them personally and be open to their points of view to help everyone to work happy so that our clients get the best experience.
Ph : (+34) 647 75 11 05
Why our name?
Our name comes from the fusion of our two greatest passions:
Travel, as source of experiences and wisdom (reflected in Ulyse´s Odissey as beautifully expressed by Cavafys poem Ithaka)
Geography, as our tool to look at the world to understand it and enjoy its beauty.
The logo is inspired in the landscape paintings of Spanish artist Eusebio Sempere and designed by @mariapinta_ilustracion
Ithaka (fragments)
As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery [..]
May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbours seen for the first time;[..]
Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her, you would not have set out.[..]
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
An early passion for mountains took me to the world of hiking and climbing, and the need to understand the landscapes I loved took me to study Geography, which gave me a way of looking and enjoying the landscapes of the world and became the main tool to interpret and share these with others.
I started guiding hiking clubs in my early twenties to the mountains surrounding Madrid, but a gap year spent working as volunteer park ranger in the Torres del Paine National Park (Chilean Patagonia) opened a new playground for me. After a few years guiding up and down Patagonia for a Chilean Tour Operator I started to work for the British company Across the Divide Expeditions as guide and expedition leader in destinations as varied as Nepal, Uzbekistan, China, Namibia, Marruecos, Lapland and various Latin American countries ( Chile, Argentina, Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brasil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, México).
At the same time in 2000 I founded with two other partners the British tour operator Pura Aventura, dedicated to tailor-made private tours in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. We created a strong concept of holiday combining experiences in Nature (mainly hiking) with the opportunity to share with the locals and adding a high standard of small hotels and excellent foodie experiences. In twenty years I covered the whole spectrum of tasks from guide to Director, but my time was spent mainly around guiding, product design and operations, as well as B2B sales to American and Australian Tour Operators.
On top of this dedication to the Travel Business, I have tried to develop other projects in the world of Environmental Conservation and Rural Development, mainly working for the Bearded Vulture conservation project in the Picos de Europa and Pyrenees mountains. My main role on this field has been to promote the recognition and survival of the traditional human activities beneficial for the conservation of biodiversity.
Today I want to dedicate my time to facilitating the type of travel experiences I believe are good both for the visitor and the destination, at the same time that I keep on enjoying the mountains, its wildlife and culture and the promotion of Geography as a great tool to understand, share and protect the landscapes I love.
