Names of Cactus in Spanish
Fred Allebach 9/23/99, ed. 2/21/03
This is from a letter I wrote to Jim Engelmann, grandson of the man who named the Engelmann prickly pear and the Engelmann spruce, etc. Jim had a great cactus garden in Tucson of which he gave me many great cuttings. Jim also gave us advice one time on a construction job of how to move saguaros, and his famous phrase “ you have to soak the taproot, all night”. I got all this information from books at the University of Sonora library, and they have some old books! Other information was collected from the Centro Ecológico in Hermosillo, and personal contacts on the coast and in the Sierra in Sonora.
Conflicting Mexican-Spanish plant names are part of an ongoing academic struggle to accurately match the plant scientific names with an English equivalent. Some taxonomic names may be old and outdated
Interesting factoids: in 1565, Mathiolus named the genus Opuntia, believing that the plants originated in Opuno, a place in the high Andes mountains. Linnaeus named cactus, from the Greek “kaktos”, a spiny plant. The Genus name Cereus comes from a Greek word cereanae, meaning “torch”. The plant rosemary is romero in Spanish, meaning pilgrim. The plant Suaeda ramosissima is called sosa in Spanish, how bout that Sammy Sosa !?
Pitaya, pitahaya, etc. means fruit in regional, northern Mexican Spanish. Tuna also means fruit when referring to cactus fruit, especially the tuna of prickly pear and cholla. Tuna fish is spelled atún.
Genus/ species Mexican Spanish name
Lemairocereus thurberii pitahaya/ pitayero ( the -ero ending, when concerning plants, typically describes a tree, a naranja is an orange and a naranjero is an orange tree, there are different races of organ pipes, possibly up to 7, one with fruit having hard, big spines and a tough skin and another with spines easy to remove and a soft skin, apparently there has been hybridization and the development of distinct types)
Lemairocereus thuberii var. littoralis (known only from coastal bluffs in southern Baja)
litoral means “coastal”, see your Latin
Cereus thurberii pitahaya/ pitayero (is this same as Lemairocereus thurberii?)
Cereus variabilis pitahaya, this could describe some of the organ pipe hybrids
Kemairocereus thurberii pitahaya dulce/ mauta (some people also call organ pipe “pitahaya dulce”, dulce means sweet)
Stenocereus weberii órgano/ cardón de la Mixteca (huge!)
Stenocereus pruinosus pitayos de mayo (cactus fruits of May)
Stenocereus treleasei like an organ pipe
Stenocereus marginatus órgano, like a skinny saguaro/ organ pipe
Cereus peruvianus cardón
Pachycereus pecten-aboriginum etcho/ cardón?
Cereus candelabrus cardón?
Machaerocereus gummosus pitahaya agria (you gave me a cutting, from Tiburón Island, I saw lots of them out there as well as in certain places on the mainland coast of Sonora)
Neubuxbaumia tetetzco tetetcha (looks exactly like a saguaro but lives in the valley of Tehuacán, south central México, the fruits are not red)
Pachycereus pringlei ectho/ sahueso, these are cool, they are like half saguaro, half organ pipe/ senita, pronounced “etch-o”
Escontria chiotilla like an etcho, but with less ribs, fruits are called “quiotillas”
Lophocereus schotti senita/ sina (sen is same root as senior, senator, etc., it means old, experienced, for example, señor)
L. schotti var. astralis branches taller, more slender
L. schotti forma monstrosus totem pole, var. gracile and robust
Lophopcereus gatesii grows in Baja
Cephalocereus senilis viejito (little old man)
Agave shreveii, A. palmeri lechugilla, they make a variety of tequila called bacanora from this agave, agaves are succulents and also are stalk flowering plants
Agave pacifica bacanora (a type of tequila is made from bacanora in Sonora, it is called Bacanora, it’s pretty popular and easy to get, sold in liter soda bottles, kind of like white lightning in the southern USA, home made hard liguor)
Agave schottii amol, or “shin daggers”
Dasylirion wheeleri sotol, or desert spoon, this is a kind of yucca, which are also stalk flowering
Yucca arizonica yuca, genus includes the soap tree yucca and the Joshua tree
Fouquieria macdougalli ocotillo macho (tree ocotillo), boojum etc., 7 species from the Fouquieria genus
Opuntia nopal, all prickly pear are types of “nopal”, the fruits are called tuna or tunas, in plural
Opuntia tunicata huichacame
Opuntia fulgida velas de coyote (coyote candles), coyote is an Aztec word, other Aztecismos or Aztecisms in English, are tomato and chocolate
Ferrocactus biznaga/ visnaga, (comes from two different root words in Nahuátl, the Aztec language, “huitztli” means spine and “nahuac” means surrounded by, the Spanish adapted this to “biznaga”