Joseph Gumilla (1686, in Cárcer – 1750, in the

Llanos The Llanos ( Spanish ''Los Llanos'', "The Plains"; ) is a vast tropical grassland plain situated to the east of the Andes in Colombia and Venezuela, in northwestern South America. It is an ecoregion of the tropical and subtropical grasslands, ...

) was a

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

priest who wrote a

natural history Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

of the

Orinoco River The Orinoco () is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers approximately 1 million km2, with 65% of it in Venezuela and 35% in Colombia. It is the List of rivers by discharge, f ...

region.

Biography

In 1705 he left Spain for New Granada (today Colombia) where he studied at the Universidad Javeriana in

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. He was ordained in 1714 and went to the Orinoco Mission. In 1701 he went to

Venezuela Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It com ...

and worked there for 35 years. He was sometime Rector of the School of Cartagena, Provincial Superior of New Granada, and Procurator in Rome from 1738. Here he wrote ''El Orinoco Ilustrado'' (Madrid, 1741). He returned to South America in 1743 with Filippo Salvatore Gilii. Gumilla introduced coffee into Venezuela in 1732. The beans were exported to

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References

*Gumilla, (Padre) Joseph. El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido. ''Historia natural, civil y geográfica de este gran río y de sus caudalosas vertientes''. Escrito en 1731. Ediciones posteriores: 1745, 1791 y 1882. Versión francesa, 1758. Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, Fuentes para la Historia Colonial de Venezuela, Nº 68, 1963. *Gumilla, José. ''Tribus indígenas del Orinoco''. Caracas: Instituto Nacional de Cooperación Educativa (I.N.C.E.), 1968. *Ramos Perez, Demetrio. Un plan de inmigración y libre comercio defendido por Gumilla para Guayana en 1739. ''Anuario de Estudios Americanos'', Tomo XV, 1958.

External links

Jesuit Stamps
Portrait on a postage stamp. {{DEFAULTSORT:Gumilla, Jose Spanish naturalists 1686 births 1750 deaths 18th-century Spanish Jesuits