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Salvador Rivas Martínez (Madrid, 1935), director of the Royal Botanical Garden (RJB) of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), and a historic Spanish mountaineer, among many other things, has died today in Rivas Vaciamadrid at the age of 85 years.
National Prize of the Spanish Geographical Society in 2013, he was distinguished Doctor ‘Honoris Causa’ by five universities, he was in possession of the Gold Medals of the Complutense University of Madrid (2002) and of its Faculty of Pharmacy (2005), Encomienda con Plaque of the Civil Order of Alfonso X el Sabio (2005), Celestino Mutis Award from the Cortes of Cádiz (2009) and Bronze Medal for Sports Merit (1961).
Precisely, this last recognition was received for his role as a mountaineer, a hobby that his grandfather and father inoculated him and that he began to practice at the age of 12.
In the 1960s, he was a member of the first Spanish expeditions to the great massifs of the planet, such as the Peruvian Andes in 1961, reaching Huascarán (where one of his companions, Pedro Acuña, died), and climbing more than 20 virgin peaks.
He was part of the Castilian expedition to the Caucasus in 1968 with mountaineers such as César Pérez de Tudela and Carlos Soria Fontán, crowning the north ridge of the Uschba.
In 1970 he got, together with Carlos Soria, Antonio Muñoz Repiso and other colleagues, the top of McKinley in Alaska. In 1973 and 1975 one of the components of the expeditions that achieved the first eight thousand for Spain, the Manaslu. Gerardo Blázquez, Jerónimo López and Sherpa Sonang were at the top.
Salvador Rivas surpassed the height of 8,000 meters. The staff of the Royal Botanical Garden convey their condolences to the family and friends of Salvador Rivas Martínez, biologist, botanist, mycologist, professor and mountaineer, whose name will remain in the history of botany by naming a couple of genera, three species and four subspecies.
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