Pedro Paez

Pedro Páez Jaramillo
Undated portrait of Pedro Páez
Born	1564 Olmeda de las Fuentes, Spain
Died	May 25, 1622(1622-05-25) (aged 57) Gorgora, Ethiopia
Other names	Pêro Pais (Portuguese)
Education	University of Coimbra
Occupation	Jesuit missionary, historian
Known for	Spreading Roman Catholicism in Ethiopia

Pedro Páez Jaramillo (Portuguese: Pêro Pais; 1564 – May 25, 1622) was a Spanish Jesuit missionary in Ethiopia. Páez is considered by many experts on Ethiopia to be the most effective Catholic missionary in Ethiopia. He is believed to be the first European to see and describe the source of the Blue Nile.

His two-volume História da Ethiópia (History of Ethiopia) is regarded by scholars of Ethiopian history as one of the most valuable and accurate works on the contemporary Solomonic Empire and its history (as understood by local sources) up to his own time, particularly as the works of local writers, despite the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's long tradition of literate monastic scholarship and the regular compilation of Imperial chronicles, have in large part either been lost in the centuries of intermittent conflict that followed, or have otherwise remained unknown to contemporary scholarship.

Páez was born in Olmeda de las Cebollas (now Olmeda de las Fuentes, near Madrid) only sixteen years before the union of the Spanish and the Portuguese crowns (1580-1640); that union would determine the span of Páez's missionary activity. He studied at Coimbra and, sent from Goa to Ethiopia as a missionary in 1589, he was held captive in Yemen for seven years, from 1590 to 1596, where he used his time to learn Arabic. During this period he had to travel through the Hadramaut and Rub'al Khali deserts, and tasted coffee in Mocha, being most probably the first European to undergo such experiences.