MANAGUA – Edgardo Buitrago Buitrago, historian, university professor, intellectual and author of works on poet Ruben Dario, died of a heart attack in Leon, a city in western Nicaragua, his family said Sunday. He was 85.

The Nicaraguan intellectual died Saturday afternoon at the Oscar Danilo Rosales Teaching Hospital in Leon, located 90 kilometers (56 miles) west of Managua, after experiencing health problems for the past three months.

Up until his death, he was a professor teaching history of law and the state at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Leon, where he was also the director of the Department of Juridical and Basic Sciences.

Buitrago Buitrago was an expert on the work of Nicaraguan poet Dario, known as the “Father of Modernism,” and he also held the Ruben Dario chair at the Universidad Americana (UAM) in Managua.

In addition, in 1994 he founded the Ruben Dario Archive Museum in Leon, an institution for which he served as ad honorem director, and he also had been a member of the National Committee for the Fifth Centennial of the Discovery of America since 1992.

Buitrago Buitrago belonged to the Nicaraguan Language Academy, was an honorary member of the Nicaraguan Academy of Geography and History and of the Nicaraguan Hispanic Culture Institute, as well as the Nicaraguan Writers Center.

The funeral will be held Sunday afternoon at the Guadalupe cemetery in Leon after homage is paid to Buitrago Buitrago by representatives of Nicaraguan society and a Mass is celebrated for him in the city cathedral.