{ "id": "coca-de-los-andes", "type": "entity", "name": "Coca in the Spanish record: the earliest printed descriptions of an eight-thousand-year-old crop, and the trade they priced", "summary": "Monardes in 1580 and Acosta in 1590 printed the first detailed European accounts of coca: how it is sown, dried, chewed with lime, and what it did for people who walked on it. Acosta also priced the Potosí trade at over half a million pesos a year and wrote that the traffic cost the Indians \"no poco trabajo, ni aun pocas vidas\". Museum genomics has since shown the crop was domesticated two or three times from a wild Amazonian progenitor.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "botany", "medicine", "andes", "peru", "indigenous-knowledge", "natural-history", "genetics", "colonial-economy" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quina-cascarilla-del-peru" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "old-world-plants-in-andean-healing" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mita" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "columbian-exchange" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "unanue-observaciones-clima-de-lima" } ], "questions": [ "Who first described coca in Europe?", "How was coca chewed in the sixteenth-century Andes?", "How big was the colonial coca trade at Potosí?", "Did the Spanish try to ban coca?", "Where and when was coca domesticated?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The chapter \"De la Coca\" in the third part of Monardes's Historia medicinal, printed at Seville in 1580, opens with an admission of its own limits: \"Desseaua ver aquella yerua tan celebrada de los Indios por tantos siglos que ellos llaman Coca\" — he wished to see it, and had not. What follows is nonetheless a working description: a herb about a vara high, leaves like myrtle but larger, each leaf marked with a second leaf-shape in a very fine line, seed in clusters that turns red like myrtle seed and almost black when the crop is ready; the leaf dried on cañizos so it can be kept and carried; sown in a seedbed and transplanted in rows \"como aca ponemos vn hauar, ò vn garuançal\", as a Castilian farmer sets out beans or chickpeas.", "sources": [ "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "Monardes then describes the quid and the alkaline admixture that makes it work, without knowing why it works: shells or oyster valves burnt and ground to a fine lime, mixed with the leaves while chewing so that the mass becomes a paste, rolled into little balls and dried; one is taken in the mouth and sucked, moved from side to side, and replaced when spent. It is used chiefly on journeys \"en especial si es por partes do no ay comida, o falta agua, porque el vso destas pelotillas les quita la hambre y la sed, y dizen reciben sustancia, como si comiessen\". He also reports the leaf bartered for mantas, cattle and salt as something that \"corre como moneda entre nosotros\", and the mixing of coca with tobacco by those who want to be \"algo fuera de juyzio\".", "sources": [ "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The same page carries the author's judgement of the people he is describing — \"Cierto es cosa de consideracion, ver quan amigos son los Indios de estar priuados de juyzio y estar sin sentido\" — printed beside the ethnobotany rather than in place of it. The moralising and the observation are separable, which is why the description is usable; the source is also one whose reliability the corpus sets at 0.8 on the book's own statement that its author never crossed the Atlantic and worked by questioning in Seville the men who brought the drugs home.", "sources": [ "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "Acosta, ten years later, supplies the quantities. In Potosí alone the coca trade \"monta mas de medio millon de pesos cada año\", ninety to ninety-five thousand baskets being consumed and, in the year 1583, a hundred thousand. A basket was worth two and a half to three pesos at Cuzco and at Potosí four pesos six tomines to five pesos ensayados; and it was the commodity on which almost all the baratas or mohatras — the credit-and-resale dealings of the mining town — were done.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "His agronomy and logistics are as precise as his prices. The leaf grows on small trees about a estado high in very hot and very humid country; the tree yields this leaf every four months, a crop the growers call the tresmitas; it wants great care in cultivation and more in keeping once picked; it is packed in order into long narrow baskets, and the llamas — \"los carneros de la tierra\" — carry it in droves of one, two and three thousand baskets, brought down from Andean valleys of \"calor insufrible\" where it rains most of the year.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The cost is stated by the source, in the middle of the commercial description and without prompting: the trade \"no cuesta poco trabajo a los Indios, ni aun pocas vidas su beneficio, por yr de la sierra y temples frios a cultiualla, y beneficialla, y traella\" — highland people sent down into the hot valleys to grow, cure and carry it, and dying of it. Acosta also records that the matter was argued at the highest level: \"Assi vuo grandes disputas y pareceres de Letrados y Sabios, sobre si arrancarian todas las Chacaras de Coca: en fin han permanecido.\" The learned debate over uprooting every coca plantation is on the record, and so is its outcome.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "He reports the pre-Hispanic regulation as well. The Indians prize the leaf beyond measure, and \"en tiempo de los Reyes Ingas no era licito a los plebeyos, vsar la Coca sin licencia del Inga, o su Gouernador\"; the Inca lords used it as a royal and prized thing, and in their sacrifices it was the thing they offered most, burning it in honour of their idols. Coca under the viceroyalty was therefore not a colonial invention but a restricted good that the colonial market opened up — which is also the shape of the objection the letrados were making.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "On the pharmacology Acosta breaks with the learned opinion of his own side, and says he is doing so: \"Muchos hombres graues lo tienen por supersticion, y cosa de pura ymaginacion. Yo por dezir verdad, no me persuado, que sea pura ymaginacion: antes entiendo, que en efecto obra fuerças y aliento en los Indios.\" His evidence is behavioural — men walking doubled stages on a fistful of coca and sometimes eating nothing else — and personal: of the alkaline paste eaten with it, \"ella yo la he prouado, y sabe a çumaque\", I have tried it myself and it tastes of sumac.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "He also notes the leaf's monetary function twice over: the Indians \"con ella rescatan como si fuesse moneda, quanto quieren\", and in his survey of what served for money before coin, coca in Peru stands beside cacao in Mexico, iron wedges in Paraguay and woven cotton in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. His summary of the whole business is a balance rather than a verdict: \"Todo podria bien passar, sino fuesse el beneficio y trato della con riesgo suyo, y ocupacion de tanta gente\" — it would all pass well enough but for the risk to those who work it and the number of people the traffic ties up.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The crop these two chapters describe has since been given a deeper history. A 2020 phylogenomic study using 424 nuclear genes from 154 Erythroxylum samples, some 90 per cent of them herbarium specimens, concludes that coca \"originated two or three times from this wild progenitor\", Erythroxylum gracilipes: Colombian and Trujillo coca from one older domestication in north-western South America, Huánuco coca from a second, possibly in south-eastern Peru, and Amazonian coca either sharing Huánuco ancestry or representing a third event, with population differentiation values between 0.25 and 0.78. What Monardes and Acosta described as one plant was at least two independently domesticated ones.", "sources": [ "white-2020-origins-of-coca" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "A 2019 review of the genus places the practice among the oldest of its kind — coca is among the oldest cultivated medicinal plant species, \"with evidence of its use dating back at least 8000 years in South America\" — counts roughly 230 Erythroxylum species with two cultivated and four named varieties, and reports cocaine content by variety, from 0.11-0.41 per cent of dry weight in Amazonian coca to 0.77 per cent on average in the Colombian one, alongside the leaf's protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron and B vitamins. The confidence here is held down deliberately: the review itself warns that the literature on coca's physiological effects \"consist[s] of case studies rather than clinical trials\".", "sources": [ "restrepo-2019-erythroxylum-review" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "What the Spanish contribution amounts to here should be stated exactly. These chapters are the earliest printed descriptions in Europe of the cultivation, curing, trade and effects of an Andean crop, written by men who named their sources and, in Acosta's case, tested part of the claim personally; and they preserve figures — baskets, prices, harvest cycles, cargo trains — that no indigenous record of the period supplies in that form. They are also documents of the system that scaled the trade: the market Acosta prices was the Potosí market, and the same silver economy ran on the labour draft that emptied the highland villages. Both are in the same source, and neither is reported here without the other.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590", "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580" ], "confidence": 0.8 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language coverage of coca runs almost straight from \"the Incas chewed it\" to nineteenth-century cocaine, with the sixteenth-century Spanish accounts cited as hearsay or as prohibitionist boilerplate. Both chapters are quoted here from the page scans, and they turn out to contain the opposite of boilerplate: a Seville physician who says plainly he never saw the plant, and a Jesuit who prints the Potosí trade figures, the price of a basket in two cities, the deaths the traffic cost, the debate over uprooting every plantation and its outcome, and his own refusal of the learned consensus that the leaf's effect was imagination — a refusal he supports by tasting the lime paste himself. Set beside museum genomics that finds two or three independent domestications, the record reads as evidence rather than as polemic in either direction.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-15", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/coca-de-los-andes", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/coca-de-los-andes.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Coca in the Spanish record: the earliest printed descriptions of an eight-thousand-year-old crop, and the trade they priced", "description": "Monardes in 1580 and Acosta in 1590 printed the first detailed European accounts of coca: how it is sown, dried, chewed with lime, and what it did for people who walked on it. Acosta also priced the Potosí trade at over half a million pesos a year and wrote that the traffic cost the Indians \"no poco trabajo, ni aun pocas vidas\". Museum genomics has since shown the crop was domesticated two or three times from a wild Amazonian progenitor.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/coca-de-los-andes", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-15", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Historia natural y moral de las Indias, en que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales, plantas, y animales dellas: y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes, y gouierno, y guerras de los Indios", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=26zAd4TrWXsC&pg=PA1" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Primera y segunda y tercera partes dela Historia Medicinal: delas cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que siruen en Medicina", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=eAtm3cE1smAC&pg=PP5" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The Origins of Coca: Museum Genomics Reveals Multiple Independent Domestications from Progenitor Erythroxylum gracilipes", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744036/" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Erythroxylum in Focus: An Interdisciplinary Review of an Overlooked Genus", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6833119/" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Coca in the Spanish record: the earliest printed descriptions of an eight-thousand-year-old crop, and the trade they priced" } }