Hector Nunez

Hector Nunes was a leader of the Marrano community in England during the second half of the 16th century. He was also a distinguished physician and successful merchant.

Hector Nunes was born in Portugal but later he settled in England to avoid the Inquisition. At the University of Coimbra he studied medicine and earned his MB in 1543. Three years later he emigrated to Bristol and by 1549 he resided in London. He was admitted a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1554.

Although a successful medical doctor, Nunez chose to expand most of his energies trading extensively in Europe, Morocco, South America, and India, between 1560 and his death in 1591. In 1573 Queen Elizabeth granted him a 15-year monopoly of the importation of all kinds of Spanish wool for making felt hats. His large-scale trading activities in the Mediterranean enabled him to provide information for the government, and it was he who brought Sir Francis Walsingham, whose friendship he enjoyed, the first news of the arrival of the Spanish Armada at Lisbon from where it sailed to English Chanel.