The Secretary of State for Rural Affairs and Water and President of the Biodiversity Foundation has awarded the insignia corresponding to the Commendation of the Order of Isabel La Católica to the Swiss scientist, naturalist and philanthropist Luc Hoffmann, founder of the WWF.

The Secretary of State for Rural Affairs and Water and President of the Biodiversity Foundation has awarded the insignia corresponding to the Commander of the Order of Isabel La Católica to the Swiss scientist, naturalist and philanthropist Luc Hoffmann, founder of the WWF and promoter of the International Convention for the Protection of the World’s Wetlands (Ramsar).

The insignia was awarded to the Swiss naturalist by H.M. the King, for the services rendered to Spain: Luc Hoffmann has dedicated his life to patronage and to the support and defense of nature conservation in our country and in other parts of the world. His intervention was decisive in the protection of what is now the Doñana National Park.

The tribute ceremony held today in collaboration with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and inaugurated by its president, Rafael Rodrigo, was attended by Juan Luis Arsuaga, who provided his vision of the current state of Spanish science in research on the origin of man, and Fernando Hiraldo, who delved into the legacy of Hoffmann and José Antonio Valverde, pioneers of nature conservation in Spain.

Guardian of the world’s wetlands

Luc Hoffmann (Basel, 1923) is the heir to the family that founded the Hoffmann-La Roche laboratories (today Roche). With a PhD in biology, Hoffmann has been a pioneer in the conservation of nature and, in particular, of wetlands, which he wanted to preserve as early as the 1940s.

Hoffmann participated in numerous battles that protected large areas of wetlands around the world, starting with those of the Camargue, at the mouth of the Rhône, in the south of France. In 1954, he founded the Tour du Valat biological station there, a nature reserve covering about 2500 hectares. Hoffmann’s interest led him to lead the MAR project, which in the 1960s made it possible to coordinate waterbird censuses and wetland inventory. This project culminated in the signing of the International Convention for the Protection of Wetlands (Ramsar, 1971).

In turn, his friendship with José Antonio Valverde allowed him to discover the ecological treasure of the Guadalquivir Marshes and its famous Coto de Doñana, as well as the pressures that threatened it (among others, its drainage to extend agricultural areas). This is how the idea of buying land to protect the Doñana marshes came about and, in that endeavor, Hoffmann collaborated with other scientists in the creation of WWF International, an organization of which he was vice president until 1988. Since 2004 he has promoted various conservation projects in Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau, having promoted the creation of the Orango and Poilao National Parks in Guinea-Bissau.

The father of Doñana

A pioneer in nature conservation in Spain, José Antonio Valverde (Valladolid, 1926 – Seville, 2003) was the founder of Doñana and a prominent research professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Valverde was considered by the scientific community of his time a man on a par with Darwin, as he provided humanity with an innovative theory on the origin of man.

Like Darwin or Humboldt, he undertook long expeditions from which he extracted information to write his work. He travelled through Morocco, the French Camargue and the Sahara during the 50s. With this, he broke the sedentary lifestyle that characterized Spanish zoologists and thus became one of the best naturalists in Spanish history, an unparalleled ecologist and a renowned scholar of vertebrate communities. In 1954 he met Luc Hoffmann, who introduced him to the international scientific community. This meeting bore fruit in a long and lasting friendship.

At the end of the 50s, Valverde faced the challenge of recovering Doñana. Then, he requested and obtained from the CSIC the necessary permission to open an international collection in order to buy the current reserve of the Doñana Biological Station, something that they finally achieved with Hoffman in August 1961. Valverde directed the Doñana Biological Station until 1975.

Among Valverde’s main contributions in the scientific field are the discovery of the energetic relationship between predator and prey (1963), the basis of the current theory of “Optimal foraging” (1966); the constant relationship of sizes between the species of a community, expressed in the cenograms, and the granivorous phase of anthropogenesis, developed in “Bases écologiques de l’évolution humaine” (1964).

 In the last years of his life, the Spanish scientist was awarded numerous times. He received national and international distinctions. Today the Biodiversity Foundation and the CSIC have paid him a well-deserved tribute, in the presence of his friend Luc Hoffmann.