He finished his pharmacy studies in the University of Barcelona where he became a teacher of botany between 1924 and 1930, he got his Ph.D. degree in Madrid in 1928. He extended his studies in the University of Géneve and in the botanical Institute of Berlin-Dahlem. He contributed to the knowledge of the Spanish plants with his thesis Estudios sobre la flora y la vegetación del macizo de Mágina (1929).

In 1931 he obtained the professorship of descriptive botany in the faculty of pharmacy in Madrid; he was also the director of the tropical plants section and later on, in 1936, he became the director of the botanical garden in Madrid. In 1939 he was exiled to America and became a teacher in the Botanical Institute in Bogota. In Cali, he became the director of the Comisión Botánica del Valle del Cauca and director of the Escuela Superior de Agricultura Tropical. Since 1947 he lives in USA where he had been taking care of the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago and he is a member of the department of botany at the Smithsonian Institution. He is considered as an specialist on tropical botany who had described new plant species.

Main works

• Estudios sobre la flora y la vegetación del macizo de Mágina (1929)
• Plantae colombianae novae (1933)
• Observaciones geobotánicas en Colombia (1938)
• Nota a la flora de Colombia (1934)
• Estudios sobre plantas andinas
• Theobroma: Cacao and its allies (1964)

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