Salvador Rivas Martínez, the botanist, the professor, the pharmacist, the biologist, the doctor, the academic, has died ... And on the other side of life, the mountaineer-climber of difficult mountains, the nature explorer, the who seeks in life emotion, feeling or fear ... and not always erudition.

It is very difficult to know where Salvador Rivas was best known and respected. In both worlds, he was an authority for almost 60 years.

At the Complutense University of Madrid he was one of the most illustrious professors in Spain, as Rector Villapalos reminded me on the occasion of that tragic University Expedition to Everest that I had the honor and horror of leading 20 years ago.

Rivas was feared as a teacher, when he forced his students to present an inventory of hundreds of plants in order to examine them. He was always considered one of the great world researchers in this demanding field of knowledge.

We climbers alpinists knew him for his great efforts on the walls and on the edges of the great mountains. Rivas was a scholar wherever he was and he accurately remembered the names of distant geographic regions, sites and glaciers.

1961 was the year of the great expedition to the Andes of Peru , the first official departure of mountaineers to South America and Rivas was already Doctor "cum Laude". On the same page of the ABC gravure, Elola Olaso appeared with his fellow expedition members in an audience with the Head of State, the other half of the page being dedicated to him as a scientist. That year, 1961, his great climbing companion, the mountain shoemaker Pedro Acuña , also died in the Peruvian Andes. He fell into a crevasse in the Huascaran, driving an ice thorn into his lungs. So exciting and so intense is the life of many rock climbers.

And Rivas lived his sports (I would say metaphysical) desires with the utmost dedication. All his life were intense memories of extraordinary situations, such as that bivouac with the Spanish expedition to the Caucasus, the third or fourth night spent in the heights of the Uschba , considered then one of the 10 most important mountains on Earth, after having completed the 500 meters of ice where Cassin's expeditions and Hillary's own had failed.

Now it is together to say that in addition to the "eight-thousandths" in which hundreds of athletes follow the fashion, and crowd in the tracks opened by the Himalayan Sherpas on the open path of Everest, which continues to climb in the Alps, the Andes, the Caucasus, Patagonia, the Dolomites, where I don't know how to place fixed ropes, on which you have to climb as you live, with risk and great enthusiasm, discovering the path of life for yourself.

One of those extraordinary explorers has been the illustrious Rivas, the botanist. I will continue to pay my respects and admiration to him. And I will expand as soon as possible the column dedicated to him in my book "Crónica Alpina del Siglo XX" by Ediciones Desnivel.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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