Carlos Sanchez Ortiz De Salazar, 47, was apparently discovered with a “dirty face and large beard” by two mushroom pickers in Tuscany, a fortnight ago.
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After days of fruitless searching, the hunt for a missing Spanish doctor, who was legally declared dead in 2010 but found deep in a Tuscan forest, has been called off.
Carlos Sanchez Ortiz De Salazar, a doctor from Seville, dropped out of in 1995, at the age of 26 suffering from depression.
On Saturday, they joined a search party and ventured towards the camp that the mushroom pickers had discovered.
The foragers returned hours later with a forest ranger and were greeted by the mysterious loner.
He showed the foragers his passport to prove his identity and said: “I’m Spanish, my name is Carlos and I’ve been living here since 1997”.
They were convinced that it is impossible to find a man who doesn’t want to be found, especially in the densely wooded 9,000 hectares that make up the Bandite forest. Salazar provided a faded, expired passport with his name on it. The men photographed the passport. One of them managed to snap a photo of it with a smartphone, which they used to inform local authorities of his presence and the missing persons association.
Experts think that Salazar must have arrived in Italy on his beloved road bike, a gift from his parents before he disappeared.
His mother said it was “very important” to the parents to know that he was alive and that they were anxious about his health.
The mayor of Cazalla de la Sierra, a town near Seville where Mr Sanchez had lived with his family, described him as a studious young man who had studied psychology as well as medicine, and spoke several languages.
La Scala said it will be a hard to find him because he has disappeared again and there is no news about his whereabouts.
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According to the Daily Telegraph, speaking to Italian press, his mother Amelia, 65, said: “When they told us that it was him, it was as if our son had been born again”.
