José María Hugo de la Fuente Morales

Who was José María Hugo de la Fuente Morales?

José María Hugo de la Fuente Morales was a Spanish entomologist. Born in Pozuelo de Calatrava, Ciudad Real, Spain, son of the Madrilenian doctor Ildefonso de la Fuente Villanueva and Pozuelo de Calatrava native Anastasia Ramona Morales Hornero, he was the second of nine children, of whom only four would reach adulthood.

He began training as a priest studying Latin in Moral Calatrava and completed his studies in the seminaries of Toledo and Jaén. During breaks in these studies, he sent an insect, that he identified as Pycnogaster graellsi, to Ignacio Bolivar Urrutia, professor of entomology at the Central University. Urrutia, after confirming Morales's accurate identification, sent three drawers of insects to him to encourage him in his investigations and so that he could identify new species that he might find. That excited the scientific sense of the young seminarist and ended with his becoming one of the European leaders of entomology.

He was a priest in Ciudad Real in 1879, and he moved to an Almagro in 1888. There he dedicated himself to adding to his collection of reptiles and amphibians and composed a booklet of poetry that is conserved in the Museum of Ciudad Real. After about a year in Ciudad Real he became coassistant of the parish of San Bartholomew between 1890 and 1891. Finally he fulfilled his great desire, expressed in his poetry, to return as priest to his town, Pozuelo de Calatrava, where he was assigned permanently, and he began intensive entomological activity, for which he learned different languages in order to understand the specialized bibliography. There also he completed an important library specializing in entomology of more than four hundred volumes in several languages and an important collection of insects that is also conserved with other works in the Museum of Ciudad Real.