Francisco Javier Vergara y Velasco
Francisco Javier Vergara y Velasco was a Colombian geographer, cartographer and historian.
Life and work
His major works are the Nueva Geografía de Colombia and the Atlas completo de geografía colombiana, through which he won the Charles Manoir price of the Paris Geographical Society.Vergara was an erudite and critical writer, and his geographical thoughts did not fit within the parameters of the dominant geographical ideologies in the country of his time; his work serves as a starting point for studies of the history of territorial formation in Colombia.
The anarchist French geographer Elisée Reclus based his chapter on Colombia in his Nouvelle Géographie Universelle on the works of Vergara y Velasco.