Juan Diego del Castillo

Juan Diego del Castillo (d. 1793) was a Spanish pharmacist and botanist who joined Vicente Cervantes in Mexico. Castillo wrote "Plantas descritas en el viaje de Acapulco". He died in Mexico. Castillo had been a contemporary of Martín Sessé y Lacasta. In New Spain, Lacasta had been joined by a group of Spanish botanists selected by Casimiro Gómez Ortega, director of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. These included Cervantes, José Longinos Martínez, and Del Castillo.

Del Castillo left a large sum of money towards the printing of their projected book "Flora Mexicana". Cervantes named the genus "Castilla" after him. [M.J.R. Loadman, "Tears of the Tree: The Story of Rubber –a Modern Marvel" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25.]

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