“The illustrious Bolívar, hunting grasshoppers at seventy years old, to the general amazement of the eagles, vultures, and hobbies of the Carpetovetonic mountain range.”
Juan Mairena
Antonio Machado
Ignacio Bolívar y Urrutia (Madrid, 1850–Mexico City, 1944) was an internationally renowned zoologist and a driving force behind scientific research and educational renewal. From childhood, he felt a penchant for nature, and although he earned a doctorate in Natural Sciences, he also had to enroll in law, as did many other naturalists of the time.
Professor of Arthropods at the Central University of Madrid (1877), president of the Board for the Expansion of Scientific Studies and Research (1934-1939) and of the Royal Spanish Society of Natural History, he was director of the National Museum of Natural Sciences for almost four decades (1901-1939), proving to be a capable manager and highly influential in the scientific policy of his time.
Bolívar published more than 300 titles and discovered more than 1,000 species, mostly of Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, and scorpions). In 1928, the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical, and Natural Sciences awarded him the Echegaray Medal, the highest scientific honor, awarded only 19 times from its foundation in 1907 until 2025.
In 1931, he occupied Chair F of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language; And in 1935, he presided over the VI International Congress of Entomology, a milestone in the scientific history of our country.
Bolívar, a member of the "Restoration generation of scholars," went into exile in Mexico at the end of the Civil War. At the age of 89, he founded Ciencia: a Spanish-American journal of pure and applied sciences, a benchmark of Republican scientific exile that allowed expatriates to continue their research and collaborate with their peers from almost the entire world. Bolívar died at the age of 94 in his Mexican exile, ignored by a country that should have felt honored by his achievements.
