Andrés Navarro Torrens

Andrés Navarro Torrens was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on 23 June 1844. He died in 1926. A physician, teacher and curator, he belonged to the generation that established El Museo Canario and connected scientific collecting with the public life of the city. His parents were the physician and memoir writer Domingo José Navarro y Pastrana and Agustina Torrens Pérez. His career combined medical care, education and sustained work in a scientific institution that he helped found alongside his father.

He entered the Colegio de San Agustín in 1850 and completed his secondary education in 1861. The following year he began studying medicine at the University of Madrid. He finished his degree between 1867 and 1868, pursued further training in Paris and returned to Las Palmas. He practised medicine in several centres and communities on Gran Canaria. In 1884 he married Rosa Manly de Azofra. They had three children, two of whom, Gustavo and Andrés, survived him.

His medical career brought responsibilities affecting the wider population. Appointed director of Maritime Health in 1877, he inspected ships and their crews to protect the city against the introduction of epidemic diseases. He became director of Public Hygiene in 1899. Alongside this work, he taught at the local secondary education institute from 1872 and at San Agustín from 1876. Teaching and medicine therefore developed together throughout his professional life, rather than forming separate episodes in his career.

During the influenza epidemic of 1918, at the age of seventy-four, he moved into the Gando quarantine hospital to treat sick crew members of the steamship Infante Isabel. Hundreds of people from the vessel were admitted, and around fifty died. His work attracted considerable attention in the contemporary press and earned him the Gran Cruz de Beneficencia. This response to a public health emergency continued a family commitment also evident in his father's medical work during the cholera epidemic of 1851.

He was a founding member of El Museo Canario in 1879 and held several positions, including second and first vice-president and permanent curator. In 1888 he travelled to Mexico hoping to make his fortune, but without success. He returned to the islands in 1889 with a collection of Mexican archaeological objects, which he donated to the museum. His gifts, together with those of Diego Ripoche, René Verneau and Justine Rondot, helped form its collection of foreign archaeology.

He also cultivated drawing and took an interest in the city's green spaces. He designed and created a garden opposite San Telmo in 1876 and became director of Trees and Public Gardens in 1891. He left unpublished memoirs and a diary of his Mexican journey. The Cabildo published the diary in 1991 with the subtitle Diario patético de un emigrante. In 1932 the museum named a room Sala Navarro, recognising both father and son's contribution to its collections and institutional history.