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18-10-2024

The UB will preserve the botanist Pius Font i Quer’s Bages flora herbarium

Next Monday, 21 October, at 4.00 p.m., the University of Barcelona will host the reception of the Pius Font i Quer’s herbarium of the Bages flora at its Historic Building’s Aula Magna. The hiking center of the Bages region, Centre Excursionista de la Comarca del Bages (CECB), has looked after it for more than a century and in 2021 ceded it to Manresa City Council. Now, this collection of great scientific interest will finally be deposited in the UB’s CRAI Plant Biodiversity Documentation Center (CeDocBiV) to guarantee its conservation and public access.

Joan Guàrdia, rector of the UB, will chair the institutional event, which will be attended by Joan Vallès, director of CeDocBiV, professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences and member of the Institute for Research on Biodiversity (IRBio); Lourdes Chamorro and Antonio Gómez, from the Faculty of Biology and IRBio, secretary and director of the UB herbarium, respectively, and Marc Aloy, mayor of Manresa.

Font i Quer: a scientific reference for generations of botanists

The herbarium of Bages by Pius Font i Quer gathers a large part of the samples that support the data of the illustrious botanist’s doctoral thesis, which he presented in 1914 under the title Ensayo fitotopográfico de Bages (Phytotopographical essay of Bages). The herbarium comprises 628 sheets or specimens corresponding to 618 taxa. The sheets are arranged by families and were collected between 1909 and 1912 in the Bages region. Coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of Font i Quer’s death, the reception of the new herbarium pays tribute to an emblematic scientist of the UB who promoted a paradigm shift in teaching and research in botany. Furthermore, this exhibition, which will now be hosted by CeDocBiV, vindicates the value of herbaria as constant sources of new knowledge and not simply as collections of old and dead plants.

Pius Font i Quer (Lleida, 1888 - Barcelona, 1964) is considered the most outstanding Catalan botanist of the 20th century, both for his contribution to the world of scientific research and dissemination and for his role as promoter and manager of the most important naturalistic research institutions in Catalonia. With his exhaustive and passionate work, Font i Quer placed Catalan botany at the highest European level. Condemned and repressed after the Civil War, he was the author of the reference titles Diccionario de botánica (1953) and Plantas medicinales (1962), and has become the scientific model for new generations of naturalists, such as Ramon Margalef, Pere Montserrat and Oriol de Bolós.

Founder and first director of the Botanical Institute of Barcelona and the Montjuïc Botanical Garden, Font i Quer made a decisive contribution to the standardization of Catalan botanical lexicography and compiled a very extensive inventory of the flora of Catalonia, the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco. In his teaching work, as a professor of Botany at the former Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Barcelona, he was a renovator in his methods, as he based the learning of botany on experimentation and direct observation of nature.