By Benigno Varillas
“Ferbison”, Fernando Morán, has died. He was 54 years old. The Iberian bison waited 10,000 years for him. They barely resisted entrenched in the depths of the Polish forest of Bielowiezka. Will they now have to endure a hundred more centuries, for another descendant of the Spaniards of Altamira to emerge to repair prehistoric memory?
Is there anyone left, who has the guts to pick up this fallen flag?
Fighting against the sacrilege that we committed by mowing the life of the last sacred totem of free humans who hunted on the race with the wolf, in Magdalena Spain, is the legacy left to us by this Asturian veterinarian, who in the last two decades attracted nature conservation to the world of hunting.
“What a hero, what a great man!”, wrote, regretting his death, the British Ben Goldsmith, one of his supporters along with the Portuguese Ricardo Machado, the South Africans Jessica and Alexander Hohne, and other great Spanish owners of hunting grounds who supported him, such as Manuel Moreno or José Miguel Isidro, all of them guardians, along with another half a dozen fighters who housed in their lands some of the herds of bisons that Morán took out of Bielowiezka in alliance with Wanda Olech, professor at the University of Warsaw, president of the group of bison specialists of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Between 2010 and 2025, Fernando Morán brought to Spain and Portugal more than 150 European bison in transports carried out against all those who oppose. No one could stop him. When once in their routine work a patrol stopped the striking truck, and Fernando explained to them what he was doing, the agents got on their motorcycles and escorted the treasure a long way, as honors are given to all majesty that returns from exile to recover their kingdom again.
In this year of 2026 he planned to bring another 500 bison to Spain and Portugal and, with them, to complete the operation of his dreams: to bring together in a single territory six farms of Sierra Morena that total 30,000 hectares without fences or roads, in which to create the large reserve of cattle and wild horses in Europe. In November 2025 he took the flower and cream of those who restore their properties in Great Britain and France to return the non-domesticated free, including Andre Hoffmann, Charlie Burrel and Henry Dimbleby, to visit that territory, where south and north of the same Morán located years ago two herds of bison, in Andújar and Villarrubia de los Ojos and a herd of wild horses, to the west, in the Cáceres mountain range of Las Villuercas. He also introduced them in Monfortihno, Portugal, taking them there a couple of years ago, with the international organization Rewilding Europe led by Franz Scheperd, a herd of bison.
He not only watched over bison and wild horses. He was working with the Maasai and the Government of Tanzania so that the last 400 Hadzabe Bushmen, still gatherers–hunters like those who painted the bison of Altamira, Chauvet, Ekain and Candamo, could live again as they did for a hundred thousand years, in their territories south of the Serengeti, Olduvai and Ngorongoro.
He had plans for rewilding in Macedonia, in the Balkans, and to recover the marine life of the Cantabrian Sea. His projects were immeasurable. But, suddenly, the cyclone that he was, subsided while he slept, in a hotel on the coast of Morocco, where he had gone with his wife and two children to say goodbye to the year surfing, his favorite sport, toasting to achieve his goals of 2026. His sudden death from cardiac arrest on the night of December 30, 2025, leaves primitive Europe without the man “absolutely key to the future of the European bison.
Irrepresentable,” wrote Dr. Carlos Fernández Carrillo in the group Rewilding Wild Europe, which brings together several of those who work in Palencia, Burgos, Segovia, Teruel and other areas to recover the cultural and economic heritage, that the wild Iberian Peninsula supposes.
“Fernando was one of the few really active people at the European Bison Conservation Center (EBCC) and was an award-winning member of the European Society of Bison Friends. Without Fernando, the world will be worse. I’m going to miss him a lot,” Wanda Olech said.