Biography

Spanish pharmacist from Corella in Navarra, the son of chemist José Tafalla Balduz and his wife, Josefa Navascués. In 1776 he lived in Villava, Navarra where he joined the army and in 1784 was stationed in Lima, Peru. Tafalla joined the expedition of Ruiz and Pavón to Peru and Chile in 1785, after the French botanist Joseph Dombey had left the expedition. Ruiz and Pavón returned to Spain in 1788 leaving Tafalla to continue collecting plant material that he forwarded periodically to the offices of the expedition in Madrid (MA). He later collected in Guayaquil, Ecuador (1799-1802) for the Flora Huayaquilensis and in the Andes of Ecuador (1803-1804) with botanist Juan Manzanilla and the artist Xavier Cortés. Ruiz and Pavón based much of their published work on the specimens and documentation of Tafalla and the material of Tafalla and Manzanilla is difficult to distinguish from that of Ruiz and Pavón. Tafalla died in Lima on 1st October 1811, his work on the Flora Huayaquilensis remaining unpublished until 1991, when a document was discovered by science historian Eduardo Estrella (1941-1996) that allowed him to distinguish the plates of the Peruvian and Ecuadorean projects.