Biography
Reginaldo de Lizárraga (c. 1539-1615) was a Spanish-born Dominican friar. Brought to Peru as a child with his parents, he took the Dominican habit and, over nearly half a century, traveled the territories of Spanish America from Quito to the Strait of Magellan, holding various conventual offices before rising to the episcopate. Around 1605, in a convent in Paraguay, he completed his Descripción colonial, a vast inventory of the New World grounded in what he saw with his own eyes. Left unpublished for a long time, his account is today counted among the richest testimonies on late sixteenth-century Peru and Chile.
