José Antonio Valverde

Saviour of Europe's most important wetlands, at Doñana in south-west Spain

José Antonio Valverde, biologist and conservationist: born Valladolid, Spain 21 March 1926; married (three sons); died Seville, Spain 13 April 2003.

When Jose Antonio Valverde first visited Spain's Coto Doñana in his twenties, the rare Iberian Lynx was still hunted down for sport in the vast wetlands around the estuary of the Guadalquivir.

The young naturalist from Spain's arid north became fascinated by these strange and beautiful southern marshes where the meeting of river and sea, and of crosswinds from Europe and Africa, created a unique ecosystem that Valverde spent his life investigating. Through his visionary determination to save this fragile natural paradise, he became known as "Father of the Doñana".

Valverde feared that proposals to drain the area for farming would destroy the rich wildlife it supported. So at a time when nature conservation was in its infancy, and almost unknown in Spain, he conducted a study of the Doñana and proposed it be declared a national park. In 1950 he requested the equivalent of £200 from the Spanish government to fund his research. They turned him down. He sought support from abroad, and launched a permanent appeal to international scientists to recognise the importance of the estuary.

Seven years later, he organised the first scientific expedition to the Doñana, the first step in defence of what became Europe's first biological reservation and is today the continent's most important wetland. Joining him on that pioneering trip were the British ornithologists Guy Mountfort, Roger Peterson and Julian Huxley.

Valverde was a self-taught naturalist schooled in the scrub and lakes around Valladolid in Castille's harsh plain, and in the city's public library. He suffered from tuberculosis that left him sickly all his life and he reckoned that he spent more time sketching and thinking than studying. However, he graduated from Valladolid University and achieved a doctorate in Biological Sciences with distinction from Madrid University. In 1958 he won a scholarship from the Juan March scientific foundation to study vertebrates in the Doñana wetlands, and in 1960 he joined the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificos (CSIC) the state- sponsored Advanced Council for Scientific Research, where he raised funds for the proposed national park; he later became professor.

He linked up with the British Nature Conservancy to form an international organisation that bought up 7,000 hectares of the Doñana in 1963. He was helped by Luc Hoffman, the Swiss pharmaceutical magnate who put his fortune at the service of conservation, the conservationist Max Nicholson and his friend Mauricio González Gordon, a big landowner, who donated a quarter of the Doñana to the Spanish state.

It amused him in later years to tell how he drafted letters that Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands sent to Franco urging him to save the Doñana, and a few weeks later wrote at the Generalissimo's request a reply to the Prince. Neither party ever discovered Valverde's role as "double agent". The correspondence cleared the way for the creation of the Doñana Reservation, embryo of the National Park declared in 1969, of which Valverde became curator. He installed in Seville a Doñana Biological Station as a branch of CSIC, that now employs more than 150 scientists. He was Director from 1964 to 1975.

Valverde was convinced that good science was the secret of successful conservation. In addition to his work on wetlands, he investigated birds of the Sahara and published in 1967 Aves del Sahara Español: un estudio ecologico del desierto ("Birds of the Spanish Sahara: an ecological study of the desert"). In 1971 he founded the Rescue Centre for Saharan Fauna, dedicated to the reintroduction of gazelles and antelopes to parts of Africa where they had disappeared. He also became fascinated by whales, and established a whale museum at Matalascañas on the western fringe of the Doñana.

With the ornithologist Francisco Bernis, Valverde co-founded the Spanish Ornithological Society (Sociedad Española de Ornitologia or SEO) in 1954, and was its president for many years. The two men visited the Doñana in 1952 and carried out Spain's first bird-ringing operation.

By chance, last weekend, on the day before Valverde died, I was taken to visit the observation station that bears his name in the protected marshlands at the heart of the Doñana, the intercontinental crossroads for migrating birds. Bee-eaters, egrets, fish eagles, purple herons, storks, avocets, spoonbills, coots and flamingoes flapped and squabbled, swooped and preened amongst the rushes and reeds. A crowd of youngsters, enthralled, peered through telescopes while a young guide explained and identified the teeming spectacle before us, his words tumbling over themselves in enthusiasm.

Elizabeth Nash