Joaquín Acosta

Who was Joaquín Acosta?

Tomás Joaquín de Acosta y Pérez de Guzmán was a Colombian explorer, historian, chorographer, and geologist.

A native of Colombia in South America, he served in the Colombian army and in 1834 attempted a scientific survey of the territory between Socorro and the Magdalena River. Seven years later he explored western Colombia from Antioquia to Anserma studying its topography, its natural history and the traces of its aboriginal inhabitants.

In 1845 he went to Spain to examine such documentary material concerning Colombia and its colonial history as was then accessible, and three years later he published his Compendio, a work on the discovery and colonization of New Granada. The map accompanying this work, now out of date, was very fair for the time, and the work itself is still valuable for its abundant bibliographic references and biographic notes. What he says in it of the writings of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada the conqueror of New Granada, is very incomplete and in many ways erroneous, but his biographies remain a guide to the student of Spanish-American history. One year after the Compendio, another work called Semenario appeared at Paris, embodying the botanical papers of Caldas.