Andrés Felipe Cárdenas Rojas

Andrés Cárdenas liked to say that the best way to understand a mountain was to lie down on it. He lay down on a lot of mountains. In the páramos above Bogotá, with a notebook, a thermos of tinto and an expression of complete happiness, he spent most of his adult life listening to frailejones, the silver-haired plants that drink the clouds and give the capital its water.

Born in Bogotá in 1987, the son of a bus mechanic and a primary-school teacher, Andrés studied biology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, earned a master's degree at the Universidad de los Andes and a doctorate back at the Nacional, where in 2019 he became an assistant professor of ecology. His research in the Sumapaz páramo, the largest in the world, helped document how highland ecosystems store carbon and regulate water, and he worked with the Instituto Humboldt on conservation plans for the páramos near Bogotá.

Students loved him. His first-day lecture began with a plastic cup of water and the question “Where did this come from?” and ended three hours later in a field, in the rain, with forty first-years staring at a plant. He lent out jackets and binoculars and kept a drawer of arepas in his office for any student who had missed lunch. Colleagues called him the department's heartbeat; students called him Pipe.

Away from the páramo he rode his bicycle in the Sunday Ciclovía, cheered for Independiente Santa Fe with a loyalty that guaranteed regular heartbreak, played the tiple badly and the guitar a little better, and cooked ajiaco with a thoroughness that frightened his friends. He met Camila Restrepo at a conservation workshop in 2016, and she was his partner and favorite co-author ever after.

Andrés died on 27 February 2024, aged thirty-six, in Bogotá, after a short illness, held by his family. His ashes will be scattered at Sumapaz when the frailejones bloom. He leaves his partner Camila, his parents Gloria and Jorge, his sister Natalia and a department of young scientists who will carry the mountain forward.