Colombian ethnobotanist. García-Barriga has collected more specimens in his home country than any other Colombian and has dedicated his life to the study of the medicinal uses of native plants. Born in Bogotá he studied at the Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé and having received his bachelors degree entered the Agronomic and Veterinary School of Bogotá. He later transferred to the Faculty Veterinaria y Zootecnia of the National University of Colombia and became a professor there in 1939. He collected species which had traditional uses in indigenous cultures, including those used to produce Curare (a poison used in hunting), El Yagé (an hallucinogen) and those used for healing. Following his first expedition to the forests of Putomayo in 1935 he decided to create one extensive work on the medicinal plants of Colombia. Following the seminal work of Enrique Pérez Arbeláez, Plantes Utiles de Colombia, García-Barriga created a multi-volume work entitled Flora Medicinal (1974-1975); it contained the names (both scientific and common) and descriptions of native plants along with their chemical composition, geographical distribution and traditional or medicinal uses. This work earned him prizes from many institutions, including Alejandro Angel Escobar (1975), the Linnaean Society of London (1979) and the prize of Scientific Merit from the Colombian Association for the Advance of Science (ACAC) in 2003.

At the National University of Colombia he was amongst the founders of the Institute of Botany in 1938 (later to become the Institute of Natural Sciences). He founded the first Botanical Garden in Colombia in 1939, the Natural History Museum and was involved in the creation of the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering. Outside the National University he was a co-founder of the Universidad Distral Francisco José de Caldas and the Faculty of Forestry Engineering, of which he was made a doctor Honoris Causa. The genus Garcibarrigoa Cuatrec. in the Asteraceae was named after him. He has been described by his student Enrique Forero as a true gentleman, about whom a bad word was never spoken. His collections number 30,000, a huge contribution to the National Herbarium (COL), to which he has dedicated a lifetime of service.