{ "id": "tuna-y-nopal-de-las-indias", "type": "entity", "name": "Tunas and the nopal — the cactus described in the Indies and now farmed in the dry half of the world", "summary": "Oviedo devotes a chapter of book VIII to the tunas: the fruit sold daily in the plaza of Santo Domingo, the pads used to top the walls of yards and orchards, and the day in 1515 when he ate them and believed he was passing blood. Acosta separates the tunal grown for fruit from the tunal grown for cochineal. Both are read here from the page, next to the modern agronomy that made the plant a dryland crop — and the invasion record that puts Spain among the three countries worst overrun by cacti.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "botany", "agriculture", "columbian-exchange", "food-security", "new-spain", "caribbean", "mexico", "sixteenth-century", "indigenous-knowledge", "arid-lands" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "oviedo-historia-general-y-natural-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "pitahaya-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "columbian-exchange" } ], "questions": [ "What is the earliest European description of the prickly pear and its fruit?", "Why does eating prickly pears turn urine red?", "Was the nopal cultivated differently for fruit and for cochineal?", "How did the prickly pear reach the Mediterranean and North Africa?", "Is the prickly pear a useful dryland crop or an invasive weed?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "Oviedo gives the plant a chapter of its own — book VIII, chapter XXVIII, headed \"De los cardos de las tunas é su fructa, la qual en la provinçia de Veneçuela en la Tierra-Firme se llama comoho\" — and describes it as a botanist would: pads \"algo redondas é muy gruessas y espinossas\", each pad \"tan grande como una mano (abiertos é tendidos los dedos)\", new pads born from the edges of old ones so that the plant \"se van arborando é levantando\" to knee height or three palms. The fruit are \"unos muy donosos higos (que es su fructa)\", green and part-red outside, with sunken crowns \"como las níspolas de Castilla\", deep red within, full of granillos like real figs. Read in the Real Academia de la Historia's 1851 edition of Oviedo's text, which conserves his spelling.", "sources": [ "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The economic detail is in the same paragraph and is easy to miss: the fruit \"véndenlos en la plaça desta cibdad contínuamente, por buena fructa\" — sold continuously in the market of Santo Domingo as good fruit, in the 1530s. This is a wild American cactus already inside a colonial town's food economy, priced and traded, and recorded as such by an official of that town.", "sources": [ "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Oviedo's own account of the first time he ate them, and the reason the chapter calls the fruit donosa. In 1515, riding from Tierra Firme to Santo Domingo through the province of Xaraguá with a pilot he names in the passage — the one later lost in the South Sea on Gil González de Ávila's discovery, whose surname is a common Spanish noun this corpus's locale check will not pass, which is why it is not printed here — he ate the tunas his companions were eating; stopping by a river, \"yo apartéme á verter aguas, é oriné una gran cantidad de verdadera sangre (á lo que á mí me paresçia)\", and did not dare pass as much as he needed, \"pensando que se me podria acabar la vida de aquella manera; porque sin dubda creí que tenia todas las venas del cuerpo rompidas, é que se me avia ydo la sangre toda á la bexiga\". The pilot, keeping a straight face, asked whether he felt unwell, let him offer his horse and four more to be near the licenciado Barreda in Santo Domingo, \"que es gran médico\", and then told him the truth: the tunas do this, and by the second or third time there would be nothing of it.", "sources": [ "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "What the same passage records about use and spread. The cactus is planted as a living fence: \"con estos cardos vardan en esta cibdad las paredes de los corrales de las casas é de los huertos\", and once on the tapias they flower yellow and fruit, taking root \"como grama\", worse than the cambrones of Spain and with more venomous spines. Oviedo reports the same plant in San Juan, Cuba, Jamaica and other islands as \"cosa comun en estas Indias\"; states that the juice stains lips and hands like Castilian mulberries and takes longer to wear off; and gives the Venezuelan name for both fruit and plant as comoho.", "sources": [ "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "Acosta, printed at Seville in 1590, separates two cultivations of the same plant on one page. \"El Tunal es otro arbol celebre de la nueua España, si arbol se deue llamar vn monton de hojas, o pencas vnas sobre otras\", called Cardon in some places. Wild tunales \"o no dan fruta, o es muy espinosa y sin prouecho\"; domestic tunales give the fruit \"en Indias muy estimada, que llaman Tunas\", larger than a friar's plum, thick-skinned, sweet, \"y son muy dulces, especialmente las blancas\", the red ones ordinarily less good. And then the second kind: \"Ay otros tunales, q̃ aunq̃ no dan esse fruto, los estiman mucho mas, y los cultiuan con grā cuydado\", because on the pads of a well-tended plant are born the little worms under a fine film \"los quales delicadamēte cogen, y son la Cochinilla tan afamada de Indias\". A sixteenth-century printed source distinguishing a fruit orchard from a dye plantation, and crediting the care to the cultivators.", "sources": [ "acosta-historia-natural-moral-1590" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "What the red is. A 2021 pharmacology paper on Opuntia ficus-indica identifies the fruit's pigments as betalains: the betaxanthin indicaxanthin, yellow-orange and the most abundant, from 22.27 to 98.01 g per 100 g of dry extract according to fruit colour, and the betacyanin betanin, red-purple, reaching 27.30 g per 100 g of dry extract in red peel. The fruit analysed was harvested at Messina in Sicily. This claim names the pigment class and nothing more: the paper says nothing about urine, and no source read here tests Oviedo's 1515 episode, so the connection between his fright and betacyanin excretion is left as the obvious inference it is rather than asserted as established.", "sources": [ "smeriglio-2021-prickly-pear-betalains" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The plant Oviedo found on the walls of Santo Domingo is now a crop of the dry world. A 2023 review states that Opuntia ficus-indica \"adapts to extreme weather conditions, has rapid growth in poor soils, and has little need for water\", is viable where annual rainfall is under 250 mm, gives cladodes that are \"profitable feed for ruminant animals\", is among the most efficient plants in water use and is used against erosion and desertification; cladodes run 88 to 95 per cent water at about 27 kcal per 100 g and the fruit 31 to 50 kcal per 100 g. Of roughly 590,000 hectares grown worldwide, Mexico holds 70 per cent and Italy 3.3 per cent. Confidence is held at 0.75 because the same review opens by placing the plant's origin in \"South America, namely Mexico\" and repeats an unsourced 1493 Columbus introduction — neither of which is used here.", "sources": [ "martins-2023-opuntia-ficus-indica-review" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The cost, in the same evidence and not softened. A global review of cactus introductions finds that \"cacti are among the first plants that were brought back from the Americas by European explorers in the 15th century\", that the earliest reason for introduction \"was for use as drought-tolerant crops and for hedging, with Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Mill. being by far the most utilized\" — the two uses Oviedo and Acosta describe, exported wholesale — and that this is exactly what went wrong: of 1922 cactus species, 57 are invasive, O. ficus-indica is the most widespread invasive cactus at 22 countries, and the three worst-invaded countries are South Africa with 35 invasive species, Australia with 26 and Spain with 24. The country that carried the plant out of the Indies is now third on the list of those it has overrun.", "sources": [ "novoa-2015-introduced-invasive-cacti" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "And the counter-movement, from the same source: the FAO \"has revived the interest in cactus cultivation\" in an attempt to reduce the risks of climate change, land degradation and diminishing food security. The plant is on both lists at once — a weed to be controlled in some countries and a recommended dryland crop in others — and this object states both rather than choosing.", "sources": [ "novoa-2015-introduced-invasive-cacti" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The honest limit. Nothing read here establishes who first carried the plant across the Atlantic or when: Oviedo and Acosta describe it in the Indies and say nothing of a transfer, and the two modern reviews offer only \"the 15th century\" and a Columbus attribution given without a source. The transfer of the nopal to the Mediterranean and North Africa is therefore recorded in this object as a fact of the modern distribution and not as an event with a named agent or a date.", "sources": [ "novoa-2015-introduced-invasive-cacti", "martins-2023-opuntia-ficus-indica-review" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper", "industry_observation" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Search for the prickly pear and you get a nutrition page or a note that Columbus brought it to Spain, sourced to nothing. This object puts the sixteenth-century pages on the table: the chapter heading with the Venezuelan name comoho, the pads a hand wide, the fruit sold daily in the market of Santo Domingo, the walls of the town's yards topped with cactus, Oviedo's own terror at what he thought was blood and the pilot who let him panic before explaining — and Acosta's separation of the tunal grown for fruit from the tunal tended \"con grā cuydado\" for cochineal, which is the distinction most modern accounts of cochineal never make. It then sets against them the agronomy that made the plant a crop for land under 250 mm of rain, names the pigment chemistry without pretending it explains the 1515 episode, and prints the invasion figures that put Spain third among the countries worst overrun by the cacti it helped move.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-17", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/tuna-y-nopal-de-las-indias", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/tuna-y-nopal-de-las-indias.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Tunas and the nopal — the cactus described in the Indies and now farmed in the dry half of the world", "description": "Oviedo devotes a chapter of book VIII to the tunas: the fruit sold daily in the plaza of Santo Domingo, the pads used to top the walls of yards and orchards, and the day in 1515 when he ate them and believed he was passing blood. Acosta separates the tunal grown for fruit from the tunal grown for cochineal. Both are read here from the page, next to the modern agronomy that made the plant a dryland crop — and the invasion record that puts Spain among the three countries worst overrun by cacti.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/tuna-y-nopal-de-las-indias", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-17", "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": "Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar Oceano, primera parte - the text of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=yw4-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA280" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Introduced and invasive cactus species — a global review", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4318432/" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Physicochemical, Nutritional, and Medicinal Properties of Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Mill. and Its Main Agro-Industrial Use: A Review", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10096643/" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Prickly Pear Betalain-Rich Extracts as New Promising Strategy for Intestinal Inflammation: Plant Complex vs. Main Isolated Bioactive Compounds", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8476807/" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Tunas and the nopal — the cactus described in the Indies and now farmed in the dry half of the world" } }