Testimonial

Por Justo Martin, Sevilla, 13 febrero 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/in/justomartinmartin/
Pie de foto, de izq. a dcha.: Justo Martín, Javier Castroviejo y Fernando Morán.

I met Fernando 15 years ago, a few days after his first transport of bison from Poland, and if something was clear to me from the beginning is that it was, in zoological terms, a unique specimen. I can’t think of another way to define a guy who when he was studying veterinary career, put on headphones and listened to ACDC at full speed to concentrate.

Great conversationalist, wherever he was he became in moments the pole of attraction of the gathering, with a waste of enthusiasm and locution in his speech from which it was difficult to escape and not get infected; and he did it with the same intensity and ease in two languages, multiplying the forums of potential receivers. You could agree with him or not, question his arguments or actions, but there is no doubt that he had an overwhelming personality, he was a real whirlwind. His laughter was as deep as his anger and he felt with the same intensity both victories and defeats, which only motivated him to undertake new battles.

He was also a person of action; that does not mean that he was impulsive, on the contrary; he meditated and thought with great care everything he did; yes, once he made a decision, convinced of himself, he launched himself to execute it without caring who or what he put in front of him. Perhaps that is why he was not too a friend of science, his doubtful behavior and his pace of advance seemed too slow for his way of being and acting. Thus, he was admired and denigrated in equal parts, by those who applauded his resolution capacity and those who were wary of his approaches, procedures and even true intentions.

Among other things of his personality, all this helps to explain something so unprecedented as that a veterinarian, without any kind of scientific or conservationist training, went in a few years from not even knowing that there was a European species of bison, to being acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest exponents of conservation efforts.

The list of projects that Fernando developed while so many or more were born and bubbling in his head was always endless. Like the trips he made through Spain and Europe to get to know places and interested people, it was almost impossible to follow his trail. The telephone conversations to catch up never lasted less than an hour, in which he consumed almost everything, and in short. Anyway, Fernando was a guy who didn’t live life, he devoured it; he was a cyclone for himself, whether it was leisure or work. Maybe that’s why he left us early, maybe his vital frenzy spent his reserves faster than he could replenish them.

Ironies of life, fate wanted that, as a modern Cid Campeador, he won his last battle after death. He always had the intuition (denigated by many “experts”) that the European bison had lived with us until relatively recently, that his absence of fossil records was only a reflection of the lack of discoveries, and that sooner or later he would end up appearing in one place or another. As a wonderful posthumous tribute, a few weeks after leaving, the remains of a 4,000-year-old European bison were discovered in Navarre, certifying that, centuries after the Egyptians built their pyramids, the bison trotted through the Iberian meadows with our ancestors. In the end, Fernando was right: his mission, as many denounced him, was not to bring an intruder from the distant eastern forests, but to return to his domains the disappeared king of the Iberian fauna.

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.

By Benigno Varillas

Fernando Morán was a man of action; he did not waste a minute in selling his image, which is not a compliment. It was a big mistake, because the greater his deeds were, the greater his person was, and this facet barely transcended.

If he had done so, many of those who did not support him would have done so, discovering that under that overwhelming appearance hid a tender person, willing to help everyone who approached him. Given his little effort in making his personality known, few could imagine that, behind his imposing physical strength, and that immense energy that he unfolded at all hours, hid a sensitive soul, capable of crying at the loss of a friend, or of getting excited at good music, another of his great vocations.

To that sensitivity, which few imagined in him, was joined by another quality, which he detected at first in the Paleolithic Bush gatherers-hunters with whom he went hunting in 2011, in Tanzania, Africa, an experience that changed his way of understanding life: like him, those imposing beings, almost superhuman, were not afraid, of anything or anyone. That virtue, which Fernando also had, allowed him to undertake actions that anyone else would feel incapable of. Not being afraid to face the unknown, to explore new ideas, to see other ways and other approaches to move the world forward was the most valuable contribution of all that made us.

Traducción:
Fernando era un hombre de acción; no perdía un minuto en vender su imagen, lo que no es un halago. Fue un gran error, porque si grandes fueron sus hechos, más grande era su persona, y ésta faceta apenas transcendió.

De hacerlo, muchos de los que no le secundaron lo hubieran hecho, al descubrir que bajo aquella apariencia arrolladora se escondía una persona tierna, dispuesta a ayudar a todo el que se le acercara. Dado su escaso esfuerzo en dar a conocer su personalidad, pocos podían imaginar que, tras su imponente fuerza física, y esa inmensa energía que desplegaba a todas horas, se escondía un alma sensible, capaz de llorar ante la pérdida de un amigo, o de emocionarse ante una buena música, otra de sus grandes vocaciones.

A esa sensibilidad, que pocos imaginaban en él, se unía otra cualidad, que él detectó a la primera en los recolectores–cazadores paleolíticos bosquimanos, con los que salió de caza en 2011 en África, una experiencia que cambió su forma de entender la vida: al igual que él, aquellos imponentes seres, casi sobrehumanos, no tenían miedo a nada ni a nadie. Esa virtud que también tenía Fernando, le permitió acometer acciones a las que cualquier otro se sentiría incapaz: No tener miedo a enfrentarse a lo desconocido, a explorar nuevas ideas, a ver otras formas y otros enfoques para hacer avanzar el mundo.

Welcome to Fernando Moran memoriam site made by his friend Benigno Varillas. (Fotos©: Benigno Varillas).

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