{
  "id": "palo-de-campeche-de-las-indias",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Palo de Campeche — the Yucatán dyewood that became the world's nuclear stain",
  "summary": "A tree of the flooded lowlands of Yucatán gave a Spanish American port its export and its name, and gave modern pathology haematoxylin, still the standard nuclear stain. Alcedo's 1786 dictionary, read from the scan, records the palo de tinte trade, the raids that wrecked it and the parish for enslaved people in the same article. Modern papers carry the chemistry and the range. The cost is on the record beside the contribution, each bound to what says it.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "botany",
    "dyes",
    "trade",
    "yucatan",
    "campeche",
    "new-spain",
    "histology",
    "medicine",
    "columbian-exchange",
    "eighteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alcedo-diccionario-geografico-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "anil-de-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "medicinal-plant-trade-from-spanish-america-1717-1815"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Where does the histological stain haematoxylin come from?",
    "What was the palo de tinte trade of Campeche?",
    "Why is the logwood tree called Haematoxylum campechianum?",
    "Was the Campeche dyewood trade profitable for the port?",
    "Is the logwood tree threatened today?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "Alcedo's Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales, Madrid 1786, tomo I, gives the wood as the making of the port. The article \"CAMPECHE, San Francisco de)\" opens on page 329 — a villa of the province and government of Yucatán, founded by Captain Francisco de Montejo in 1540, first on a river where the pueblo of Tenozic then stood, then at Potonchán or Champotón, and last moved to its site \"por la comodidad de su Puerto, que es uno de los mas frequentados y de mas comercio que hay en el golfo de su nombre\" — and on page 330 states the trade plainly: \"Ha sido esta Villa de muchísimo comercio por el palo de tinte de campeche que embarcaba, y otros frutos, como cera negra y algodon\". The dyewood is named first and the wax and cotton follow it.",
      "sources": [
        "alcedo-diccionario-indias-1786-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The same page prints the cost of that trade without being asked to. Alcedo continues: \"pero ha decaido mucho con la desgracia de las invasiones que experimentó. Primero por los Ingleses que la tomáron y saqueáron el año de 1659, luego el Pirata Luis Scot el de 1678, y despues los Flibustiers el de 1685, en que la quemáron y arruináron el Castillo principal, que quedó hecho un bosque poblado de aves y animales.\" A port whose one great export was a dyewood Europe wanted was sacked three times in twenty-six years, and the article that records the commerce records the ruin in the next sentence.",
      "sources": [
        "alcedo-diccionario-indias-1786-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Who was in the town is on the record too, in one clause. Listing the hermitages outside the villa, Alcedo names \"nuestra Señora de Guadalupe y el Santo Nombre de Jesus, la qual es Parroquia de Negros\" — a parish for Black inhabitants in the dyewood port. The 1786 article does not say who felled or hauled the wood, and this corpus will not infer it from a parish boundary; the clause is printed here because it is the only thing the source says about the people whose labour the trade rested on, and leaving it out would make the article look emptier of cost than it is.",
      "sources": [
        "alcedo-diccionario-indias-1786-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The tree is Haematoxylum campechianum, and both halves of the name point back at the Spanish American coast. A 2017 phytochemical paper in Molecules records that it is known as the \"red wood\", \"black wood\" and \"Campeche wood\" \"because it originally was found on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, in the state of Campeche\", that Mexican traditional medicine used heartwood preparations against depression, kidney disorders, heart trouble, toothache, fever, diarrhoea and haemorrhoids and the branches to remove toxins, and that the heartwood is the source of haematoxylin, employed in histology as a staining agent. The paper's own result is that two chalcones isolated from the heartwood — sappanchalcone and 3-deoxysappanchalcone — relaxed guinea-pig ileum comparably to papaverine.",
      "sources": [
        "escobar-ramos-2017-haematoxylum-homoisoflavonoids"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The dye did not become a historical curiosity. A 2023 evaluation in the British Journal of Biomedical Science states that haematoxylin is extracted from the logwood tree Haematoxylum campechianum, that the species name refers to \"its city of origin, which is Campeche, located on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico\", and that the dye \"remains the gold standard for microscopic nuclear visualisation\" and, with eosin, the staple of interpreting pathological change. The tree named after a Spanish American port is still, in 2023, what colours the nucleus in the routine stain of every histopathology laboratory.",
      "sources": [
        "gabriel-2023-haematoxylin-x-mordant"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "What is left of the forests, from a 2025 modelling paper in Ecology and Evolution. Haematoxylum campechianum grows in association with flooded lowlands, singly or in stands the region calls tintales, from the Yucatán peninsula into Tabasco and Veracruz, has naturalised in the Caribbean islands and been introduced to Australia and Africa; the paper describes it as a species that \"has a history of exploitation for obtaining natural dyes, being the main resource in the region during colonial times\", and models its present suitable distribution at about 177,000 hectares. Under the projections it gains ground toward south-eastern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, while its close sister species Haematoxylum calakmulense loses up to 8.6 million hectares of suitable area.",
      "sources": [
        "plasencia-vazquez-2025-haematoxylum-climate"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "What this object cannot tell you, stated so that nobody reads more into it than the sources carry. None of the four sources read here dates the introduction of haematoxylin into microscopy or names who introduced it, and no claim above does either; the popular attributions to the 1860s German histologists are not evidenced by anything opened for this entry. Nor does Alcedo describe the cutting: the 1786 article gives a port and its shipments, not a logging economy, and says nothing about the English logwood camps whose raids it records only as raids. The archival and commercial history that would join the two ends of this story sits on hosts that do not answer from this container.",
      "sources": [
        "alcedo-diccionario-indias-1786-t1",
        "gabriel-2023-haematoxylin-x-mordant"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Two literatures own this tree and neither talks to the other. Histology writing says haematoxylin \"comes from the logwood tree of Central America\" and moves on; popular history of logwood is about English buccaneers in the Bay of Campeche and Belize, with the Spanish port as scenery. This object binds the two: the 1786 Madrid imprint read from the page scan, naming the palo de tinte as the villa's great commerce, and the 2023 pathology paper saying the same tree is still the gold standard for nuclear staining — with the three sackings, the Parroquia de Negros and the 177,000 remaining hectares each as its own sourced claim, and an explicit claim naming what the sources do not support.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/palo-de-campeche-de-las-indias",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/palo-de-campeche-de-las-indias.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Palo de Campeche — the Yucatán dyewood that became the world's nuclear stain",
    "description": "A tree of the flooded lowlands of Yucatán gave a Spanish American port its export and its name, and gave modern pathology haematoxylin, still the standard nuclear stain. Alcedo's 1786 dictionary, read from the scan, records the palo de tinte trade, the raids that wrecked it and the parish for enslaved people in the same article. Modern papers carry the chemistry and the range. The cost is on the record beside the contribution, each bound to what says it.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/palo-de-campeche-de-las-indias",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales ó América: es á saber: de los Reynos del Perú, Nueva España, Tierra Firme, Chile, y Nuevo Reyno de Granada. Tomo I",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=4yevWyjMfbkC&pg=PP7"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Homoisoflavonoids and Chalcones Isolated from Haematoxylum campechianum L., with Spasmolytic Activity",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6151460/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Climate Change Effect on Haematoxylum campechianum and Haematoxylum calakmulense (Fabaceae): Are We Losing Our Natural Heritage in South-Eastern Mexico?",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12541238/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Evaluation of a New Mordant Based Haematoxylin Dye (Haematoxylin X) for Use in Clinical Pathology",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10560741/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Palo de Campeche — the Yucatán dyewood that became the world's nuclear stain"
  }
}