José Ortega Spottorno

Ortega Spottorno was born and educated in Madrid, studying at the Baccalaureate School of the Institute of Madrid. This education has been described as setting the course for the rest of his life, emphasising as it liberalism and secularism. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Ortega Spottorno's family became voluntary exiles, moving first to Geneva and then to Paris. While Ortega Spottorno returned to Madrid after the Civil War had ended, his father travelled to and stayed in Latin America, where he became a professor at the University of San Marcos in Lima and from where he returned to Spain only after the end of World War II in 1946. In his father's absence, Ortega Spottorno relaunched La Revista de Occidente (The Review of the West), the monthly cultural magazine founded by Ortega y Gasset in 1923. Despite training as an agronomist and maintaining a key interest in the sciences throughout his life, it was this role as editor of La Revista de Occidente which established how he would spend the rest of his life: writing and publishing at the very forefront of the industry in Spain.

Ortega Spottorno was briefly a member of the constitutional assembly which crafted Spain's new democratic constitution, between 1977 and 1979.

Ortega Spottorno stepped down from the board of El País in 1984, accepting an honorary chairmanship to acknowledge his role in founding the paper. On leaving the post, he explained that while it was prudent for those in power to "surrender their weapons before they reach old age", he also had selfish reasons for the move: to write. Between leaving El País and his death, Ortega Spottorno published three novels and was close to finishing his magnum opus, a history of the Ortega family, when he died of cancer in 2002.