Missing || Family still searching for missing mountain climber

He’s been missing for over a month but his family is determined that “faith can move mountains”.
A group of family members and friends has been taking every chance they can to keep searching for João Marinho, the 31-year-old Portuguese mountain climber from Amarante who went missing at the beginning of November in Spain’s Picos de Europa mountains.
Hoping that Marinho may have taken refuge somewhere in the wilderness of the mountains, a trio including Marinho’s brother, cousin and a close friend took to the Picos last long weekend (December 6-8), which gave them a good three days of searching.
“We always hope that we’ll have one more person with us on the way back to Portugal,” close cousin Valter Cardoso told Jornal de Notícias.
Portuguese authorities abandoned their search for João Marinho around two weeks after he is believed to have gone missing (November 3) due to the harshness of the weather. Their biggest clue to Marinho’s whereabouts was a map found in his car of the popular “anillo de los refugios” route, part of the mountain range covering Asturias, Cantabria and Castile and León.
But the family search group is thinking outside the box.
“João is unpredictable. We could be looking for him in the north and he’s somewhere in the south,” Marinho’s nephew said.
Spain’s Guardia Civil is also still intermittently searching for the Portuguese mountain climber and a group of Spanish mountain climbers, who the Portuguese search crew randomly encountered, has also offered to search for João in other areas of the mountains.
Still, Cardoso admits feeling “empty” every time he returns to Portugal.
“Going back home is always very hard. There’s always an empty spot both in our van and in our hearts,” he said.
This weekend, the group will start searching another area of the mountains known as Fonte Prieta.