Potato Arrives in Europe (c. 1570): From the Andes to Spain

The arrival of the potato in Europe, around 1570, brought one of the world’s most important food crops from the Andes of South America to Spain and the Canary Islands. For more than a century Europeans treated it as a curiosity, a garden plant or animal feed. In the 18th century it became a staple across much of the continent, feeding a fast-growing population and, in Ireland, creating a dangerous dependence.

Origins in the Andes

The potato was domesticated in the high Andes, around Lake Titicaca on the border of today’s Peru and Bolivia, roughly 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. Andean peoples bred thousands of varieties suited to different altitudes and soils. They also invented chuño, potatoes freeze-dried by exposure to night frost and sun, which could be stored for years.

By the time of the Inca Empire potatoes and maize were the twin foundations of the Andean diet. Potatoes grew at altitudes where maize could not, and stores of chuño helped feed armies and labourers.

How the Spanish encountered it

Spanish conquistadors met the potato during their campaigns in South America in the 1530s. One of the earliest written descriptions comes from soldiers in the highlands of present-day Colombia in 1537, who described tubers resembling truffles. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León described potatoes and chuño in his Crónica del Perú, published in Seville in 1553.

The first potatoes probably crossed the Atlantic as ships’ provisions rather than as a deliberate introduction. Exactly who carried them and when is not recorded.

First records in Europe

The earliest documentary evidence places the potato in the Canary Islands, Spain’s Atlantic stepping stone between Europe and the Americas. Records show potatoes being shipped from Gran Canaria to Antwerp in 1567 and from Tenerife to Rouen in 1574. Since the islands were exporting them, potatoes must have been grown there for some years already, perhaps from around 1560.

On the Spanish mainland, the accounts of the Hospital de la Sangre in Seville record purchases of potatoes in 1573. From Spain, plants passed to Italy and, through botanists, to other countries.

The Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius received tubers in Vienna in 1588 and drew and described the plant, helping it spread among European gardens. In England, John Gerard illustrated the potato in his Herball of 1597, mistakenly calling it the “Virginia potato”.

A slow spread

For a long time Europeans were suspicious of the new food. The potato belongs to the nightshade family, whose other members include poisonous plants, and its green parts are toxic. It was not mentioned in the Bible or by ancient authors. Some writers claimed it caused leprosy or other disease, and many people regarded it as food fit only for livestock or the very poor.

Ireland was among the first places where the potato became a staple. By the late 17th century it was a main food of the rural poor, because it yielded abundant food from small plots of poor land. It also spread in parts of the Low Countries, northern England and western Germany.

On the continent, governments eventually took up its cause. Frederick the Great of Prussia issued orders from 1756 encouraging peasants to plant potatoes. In France the pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, who had eaten potatoes as a prisoner of war in Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, campaigned for them after the Paris Faculty of Medicine declared them safe to eat in 1772. Famines and wars at the end of the 18th century did much to overcome lingering resistance.

Consequences

The potato’s great advantage was productivity. An acre of potatoes could feed far more people than an acre of wheat or rye, and the crop grew well in the cool, damp climates of northern Europe. It was harvested underground, so it was less exposed to trampling armies than standing grain.

Historians and economists link the potato to the rapid growth of Europe’s population after 1750. A widely cited 2011 study by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian estimated that the potato accounted for about a quarter of the growth in population and urbanisation in the Old World between 1700 and 1900.

Dependence on a single crop carried great risk. When potato blight struck in the 1840s, it caused the Great Irish Famine, in which about one million people died and a similar number emigrated.

Myths and facts

Myth: Sir Walter Raleigh or Sir Francis Drake introduced the potato to Europe. The potato was grown in the Canary Islands and Spain before either man’s American voyages could have brought it. Stories linking Raleigh to potatoes in Ireland appear much later and lack contemporary evidence.

Myth: Europeans rejected the potato only out of ignorance. Early varieties were adapted to the short days of the Andes and gave poor yields in long European summers. Better-adapted plants had to be selected over time.

Timeline

• c. 8000–5000 BC: Potatoes are domesticated in the Andes of South America.
• 1537: Spanish soldiers in present-day Colombia record the potato.
• 1553: Pedro Cieza de León describes potatoes in his Crónica del Perú.
• 1567: Potatoes are shipped from Gran Canaria to Antwerp, the earliest firm European record.
• 1573: The Hospital de la Sangre in Seville buys potatoes.
• 1588: Carolus Clusius receives potato tubers in Vienna.
• 1756: Frederick the Great orders the planting of potatoes in Prussia.
• 1772: The Paris Faculty of Medicine declares the potato fit to eat.

Why it matters

The potato’s journey is one of the most consequential parts of the Columbian Exchange, the transfer of crops, animals and diseases between the Americas and the rest of the world. Brought back in the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, it became, like tobacco, a lasting part of European life, and today it is one of the most important food crops on Earth.