The Hiking Club of Catalonia is a sporting and cultural organization founded in 1876. Today it offers services that include courses in mountaineering and organized hikes. The club also has a library of maps and photographs.
The Club was founded during the Catalan Renaissance for the purposes of investigating the richness of Catalunya from the perspectives of science, literature and the arts. It was instrumental in promoting the Catalan language; in 1906 it organized the First International Congress on the Catalan Language. And in 1907, it passed a resolution to create the Institute for Catalan Studies to pursue the study in a more academic way.
