Ricardo Armbruster Blecher, alias Nano (Madrid, 1944 –Ribadesella, 1976) was a Spanish ecologist, adventurer and entrepreneur.
He was born inMadrid to the German/Spanish family Armbruster/Blecher. His father Eugen Armbruster was a successful industrialist in Spain (tubes, plastics, metals, energy, banks, forests) and his mother, Trude Armbruster (née Blecher) was a renowned violinist.
At an early age, Ricardo Armbruster and his family discovered that schooling and academic life were not going to be his preferred way of advancing personally. He developed a wide interest in animals and nature in the 1950s, spending long periods at the family farm inCamorritos,Spain, and becoming a respected naturalist at a very early stage. Soon afterwards, at the age of 17, he decided to travel and learn. He spent some time at several academies and jobs inSwitzerland,Germany andLondon, before returning to Madrid and, from there, to the American continent. First, he traveled around theUnited States andMexico with his brother and friends, before accepting a job at a bookstore inBogotá,Colombia. After feeling frustrated by the fact that the store sold books by length for decoration rather than for reading, he felt the call of the wild, embarked on a trip to the south and disappeared in theAmazon rainforest.[1]
Some time later Ricardo Armbruster reappeared inTenerife, on theCanary Islands. He had made a living by hunting in the forest, making research films, helping national armies explore new territories and, in the end, smuggling coffee to pay for a ship fare back to Europe.
Back in Spain, Ricardo Armbruster settled down, married Erika Born, another German/Spanish national, and had two children: Yaukuma (named after aMehinaku Indian of theXingú River Basin) and Thurit Armbruster. The couple moved toValladolid, in the north of Spain, where Ricardo Armbruster became a successful entrepreneur but was mostly recognized for his activist ecologism and political positioning (against theSpanish State ofcaudilloFrancisco Franco).
Ricardo Armbruster was, together with Erika Born,Carlos Carrasco,José Gimeno andRafael Álvarez-Taladriz,[2] one of the driving forces behind the creation of theAEORMA ecologist group(Asociación Española para la Ordenación del Medio Ambiente), a strictly forbidden activity under theFrancoist State. He was also, withJulio Valdeón Baruque,José Luis Martín Rodríguez, José Luis Barrigón, Carlos Santamaría, Carlos Carrasco, Manuel Conde and others, the driving force behind the creation of theInstituto Regional Castellano-Leonés,[3] an autonomy-enhancing entity that was also subject to severe persecution by Franco's authorities.[4]
Erika and Ricardo Armbruster's home in the Castillian countryside (La Corala) soon became a preferred stop for zoologists and naturalists in the early 1970s, who brought over every kind of fauna to be treated and cured, among them the famous naturalistFélix Rodríguez de la Fuente. This made the premises look more like a zoo than a private home. The property also became a hot spot for debates about democracy and ecology among Spanish intellectuals, artists and oligarchs who appreciated Armbruster's views on these subjects.
A rebelChristian (he married under scrutiny and press coverage following theCatholic andLutheran rituals at a time ofNational Catholicism in Spain), Ricardo Armbruster died on Easter Sunday in April 1976, at the age of 32, inRibadesella,Asturias (Spain), while scuba diving in search of eels and other sea species in the cold waters of theCantabrian Sea.<El Norte de Castilla>
