En Busqueda de las Especias: Las plantas de la expedicion Magallanes - Elcano (1519 - 1522). 2020. illus. (col.). 238 p. Paper bd. - In Spanish.

In the commemoration of its fifth centenary, this book aims to pay tribute to the first round-the-world voyage (1519-1522), focusing on the botanical discoveries of its expeditionaries. An international enterprise with the participation of more than three hundred people, which demonstrated the sphericity of the Earth, made it possible to discover the configuration of oceans and continents and was the beginning of globalisation understood as a connection between different regions of the globe.

It was an expedition financed by the Crown of Castile, planned and captained by the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, completed thanks to the leadership of the Basque captain Juan Sebastian Elcano and masterfully narrated by the Lombard chronicler Antonio Pigafetta. The objectives of this first voyage around the world were fundamentally commercial and botanical: to promote the discovery of new lands and routes driven by the search for spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, pepper and, above all, cloves.

With contributions from botanists and historians from the countries from which the voyage began and where it made stops (Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the Philippines), this book offers a journey that, using plants as a common thread, describes the main milestones of this first circumnavigation. It also explains aspects of the food, anthropology, history, cartography, economics and communication of the time, and discloses the most notable results of an expedition whose consequences have had even more relevance than the very arrival of the human being on the moon.