A Climber We Lost: Javier Botella de Maglia
You can read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2024 here.
Javier Botella de Maglia died on August 2, during an attempt on Kazakhstan’s highest mountain, Khan Tengri (22,999ft). Botella, a 67-year-old doctor, had retired from a career at La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital two years prior to focus full-time on his lifelong passion of mountaineering.
A memorial penned for Botella by the Societat Excursionista de València (Valencia Hiking Society), of which Botella was a prominent member, said that he became interested in mountains at the age of 11, after reading Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna. “Books awakened in me the desire to be a mountaineer,” Botella once said.
After early years rambling and climbing in Valencia’s Serra Calderona, Botella spent the next five decades in Earth’s highest mountain ranges, all the while balancing a demanding medical career as an intensive care specialist. Among other exploits, Botella participated in the first Valencian expedition to Everest (8,848m), in 1991, and assisted in a number of attempts on Gasherbrum II (8,035m) and Cho Oyu (8,188m), summiting the latter in 1995.
Botella, it seems, was not drawn to the mountains for achievement, for flag-planting or ticklisting, but for the joy of the expedition. “I can say without blushing,” he wrote, “that in the 21st century, I still approach mountaineering from a totally romantic perspective, as a 19th century mountaineer might have.” He was known for climbing in vintage equipment, some of it dating to the early 20th century and prior, and for his outspoken belief that a mountain must be ascended, entirely on foot, from the nearest inhabited settlement. Botella was routinely outfitted in leather boots, lugging wood-handled axes, and famously hauled the same canvas pack his parents had given him as a child around with him on many expeditions
Though he flew under the radar for much of his life, Botella’s exploits were staggering. He summited peaks in the hundreds. Colin Haley, who met Botella briefly on Khan Tengri just before his death, wrote that the doughty doctor had “probably climbed more of the world’s most prominent mountains than anyone else I’ve ever met, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of them.” He climbed and trekked around the world, from Alaska’s Denali (20,310ft) to Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan’s Lenin Peak (23,406ft) to the Andes and Alps, Caucasus and Balkans, countries from Greenland to Japan to Canada. (Botella was no hopalong tourist either, he was fluent in five languages.)
Botella was evidently inspired by his reading of Annapurna in more ways than one. He didn’t just climb around the world, he also wrote prolifically, chiefly on the subject of high-altitude and wilderness medicine. He authored and translated a number of respected manuals, including Mal de Altura: Prevención y Tratamiento (2002), Nuevos Progresos en Medicina de Montaña (2006), Manual Bàsico de Medicina de Montaña (2008), and Medicina para Montañeros (2008). He was also an honorary member of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES) from its founding.
“[Botella] was a reference for mountain medicine professionals in Spain and especially in Valencia,” said Jorge Juste, medical advisor of FEMECV (Valencian Federation of Mountain Sports and Climbing). “He was always willing to collaborate and a source of wise advice.”
In a memorial from the Argentine Mountain Cultural Center, Dr. Carlos Pesce, former president of the country’s Society of Mountain Medicine, called Botella, “the most prolific writer in the Spanish language on mountain medicine.”
Dr. María Constanza Ceruti, who met Botella when the latter was presenting at a mountain medicine conference two decades ago, called his explanations “masterful, because in addition to his perfect command of the Spanish language and his extensive medical knowledge, he made a ‘surgical’ use of humor.”
“I am indebted to the vast knowledge of the great doctor Javier,” she added, “to whom I owe some very sound advice, which literally saved the life of my elderly father in the face of an acute case of hyponatremia (and even anticipated a cancer that had not yet been diagnosed).” Ceruti added that in the mountains he was an “excellent expedition leader, always attentive to important details; but not distracted by vain superficialities. He couldn’t care less about ‘fashion brands’ in equipment; or other issues that distort mountaineering as an insanely expensive or competitive practice. The frugality in his clothing and equipment was a manifest homage to the austerity of the predecessors and pioneers of this sport.”
Botella also wrote and published outside the medical world, notably Montañas Que Nos Hicieron Soñar (2017). This nearly 1,000-page tome is an exhaustive personal travel guide to over 700 mountains around the world, and is regarded as a classic in Spanish mountaineering literature. Botella explained the interweaving of his twin passions in the book’s introduction: “Intensive medicine familiarized me with seriously ill patients and accustomed me to facing death; and mountain medicine allowed me to establish a very gratifying connection between my scientific curiosity and my dreams as a mountaineer.”
When Botella died on Khan Tengri, he was climbing with longtime partners and fellow Spaniards Juan Manuel Romero and Raúl Almonacid. The pair reported that their friend began feeling unwell at Khan Tengri’s Camp II (17,400ft). The men tried to descend as quickly as possible, but Botella passed away just a few hundred feet from base camp, due to complications from high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE). Haley said that, prior to his death, Botella had told him he was acclimatizing poorly due to his hypothyroidism, and that he’d brought an insufficient dosage of synthetic thyroid hormone.
Javier Botella de Maglia leaves behind a wife, Aurora, and two children, in addition to a vast network of friends and loved ones in the worlds of medicine and mountaineering.
You can read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2024 here.
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