Although by training an agricultural engineer, José Ortega Spottorno, who died on February 18th aged 85, made his enduring contribution to Spanish life as the founder of what is, today, his country's most important and influential newspaper, El Pais.
He inherited his liberal, humanist values from his father, the renowned philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, at a time when free thought in Spain was being suffocated by Franco's national Catholicism. His father successfully combined journalism with philosophy, but the family connection with the press went even further back. His grandfather, José Ortega Munilla, edited El Imparcial at the end of the 19th century, and was one of Madrid's most important journalists.
The young José Ortega had to cut short his agronomy studies at the age of 20, when his family went into exile in Switzerland and Paris to avoid the Spanish Civil War. He returned to Spain - and to his studies - just as the second World War broke out in the rest of Europe.
It was not until 1963, eight years after his father's death, that José Ortega decided to follow family tradition and involve himself wholeheartedly in the world of letters. This was when he relaunched the intellectual monthly magazine Revista de Occidente, which his father had founded 40 years earlier. From there, he went on to found the Alianza publishing company, helping to popularise literature, essays and social commentary with cheap, pocket-sized editions.
He dared to publish authors who had been banned by Franco, and brought the intellectual trends of Europe and the US into the hands of Spanish readers by translating the major works of the time.
Having badgered money out of more than 100 investors, in 1972 he founded the Prisa publishing group, whose intention was to produce an independent daily newspaper. With Franco still alive, this was no easy matter, and it was not until 1976 - with the dictator safely dead and buried - that the group's newspaper, El Pais, was born.
The following year, José Ortega said: "El Pais should be a liberal, independent, socially aware, national and European newspaper that is attentive to the changes in Western society today. Liberal, to me, means two things: being prepared to understand or listen to those who think differently to you, and not accepting the idea that the ends justify the means." It was a message that the newspaper, in an editorial published the day after his death, pledged to abide by.
He was the first chairman of El Pais, seeing it safely through until, by 1984, it had become, together with Diario 16, the established voice of Spain's political transition from dictatorship to democracy. He handed over to Jesus Polanco, who has made the newspaper the foundation of a vast media empire and turned himself into one of the most influential people in Spain.
Left-leaning, El Pais was to support the efforts of the Socialist Workers' Party of Spain, led by the young Andalucian lawyer Felipe Gonzalez, to oust the centrist governments that had overseen the crucial first years of the transformation to democracy. José Ortega was himself involved in that process, as one of the senators named by King Juan Carlos in the parliament that was to oversee the writing of the 1978 constitution, which remains Spain's Magna Carta.
José Ortega did not begin writing full time until the age of 70, when he published his first novel - a volume that was to be followed by essays and memoirs. His intellectual respect for his father remained profound and, at the age of 81, he was to write in El Pais that "some writers regret being ourselves and not being the forebear who we have come to admire through reading his letters and seeing his tribulations".
At the time of his death, he had just completed a history of his family, Los Ortega. He remained as honorary president of El Pais until his death.
He married his French wife Simone Klein, author of one of Spain's most famous cookery books, in 1949, and had two sons and a daughter.
José Ortega Spottorno: born 1916; died, February 2002