Koenraad Van den Driessche

Argazkia: Kimia Kamvari 

Born in Ghent in 1964, fascination for walks and natural history first began when he was 12 years old and spent time in the Hautes Fagnes, an extensive wetland area in the east of Belgium in the company of a school biologist. He studied chemistry and geology in Ghent and Brussels. For his dissertation, he investigated a series of dinosaur prints in Lavini di Marco in the Dolomites. He is an official guide in the Basque Coast geopark.

As a young man, Koén organised numerous excursions with his classmates and friends, taking diversions for dramatic effect. During his time living in historic cities such as Ghent, Brussels and Leuven, he organised informal city tours, seeking out natural history in the urban environment, accompanied by historical details and aesthetic effects.

After completing a PhD in geology he decided to end his scientific career and moved to the Basque Country to develop his own personal vision of the landscape. Koén is captivated by the variety of landscapes he has found here, from rain forests to the arid steppes of the Bardenas Reales. On his walks, he has discovered the vast expanse of a landscape he calls the Cretaceous Coast, ranging from the primeval sea bed to the flysch, through reefs, islands and coastal seas, to coastal marshlands surrounded by vast tropical forests, full of dinosaur prints, on the edge of the Spanish plateau, the area covers thousands and thousands of square kilometres.

Having begun his training as a nature guide, he realised that what he wanted to do was not to provide a standard tourist-oriented service, but a personal time-related interpretation. Apart from its natural beauty, the landscape also has many tales to tell– stories dating back days, decades or hundreds of million years. 

His 'Walking in Time' is based on a stratigraphy of time, interweaving science, history, philosophy and aesthetics. He tries to bring to it the same stratigraphic approach that led to the creation of geology and archaeology, and which inspired Charles Darwin’s 'Origin of the Species' and the concept of 'Deep Time'. This consists of acting like a geological Sherlock Holmes, establishing simple temporal relations between the elements in pleasant Smithsonian walks.