Simón de Roxas Clemente y Rubio

Simón de Roxas Cosme Damián Clemente y Rubio (27 September 1777, in Titaguas (Valencia, Spain) – 27 February 1827, in Madrid) was a renowned Spanish botanist, considered to be the father of Spanish ampelography.

Born into a numerous family of 15 siblings (only six of which survived to adulthood) Simón de Rojas was a son of his father’s second wife, Juliana Rubio, and was fourth in line in term of inheritance and thus only had a very slight possibility of inheriting the family notary business. At the age of 10 he entered the seminary of Segorbe, and after studying humanities for four years he was sent to Valencia to continue his secondary education. There he studied philosophy with Antonio Galiana and became an arts professor. He also studied other subjects in the ecclesiastical curriculum and he excelled in philology especially Greek, Hebrew and Latin. However, he was more attracted to the natural sciences and he put together several collections and classifications of plants and animals. At that time, Antonio José de Cavanilles Published Observaciones sobre el Reyno de Valencia (1795–97) which stimulated Rojas’ interest in botany.

In 1800, at the age of 23, he went to Madrid to apply for the professorship of Logic and Ethics at the Seminario de Nobles and even though he failed to win it he was awarded a post at the Colegio de San Isidro. He also enrolled there as a student where he took Arabic, Botany, Mineralology and Chemistry and he made contact with people he would collaborate later, for example Casimiro Gómez Ortega (Añover del Tajo, 1741 - Madrid, 1810), botanist and head of the Madrid Botanic Gardens; Mariano Lagasca y Segura (Encinacorba, 1776 - Barcelona, 1839), with whom he co-published Introducción a la Criptogamia Española in 1802.

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