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He walked from Malaga to Damascus collecting plants

Ibn al-Baytar was born at Malaga near the end of the twelfth century, learned botany in Seville, then worked his way east through North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Anatolia, collecting and identifying plants and questioning the people who used them. He ended as chief herbalist to the ruler of Egypt and died in Damascus in 1248. His compendium of simple drugs lists roughly fourteen hundred substances, several hundred of them not described in Arabic before, arranged alphabetically, with earlier authorities named and his own findings marked as his own. Where he had checked a claim in the field and found it false, he said so. It stayed the fullest work of its kind in any language for centuries, and botanists were still mining it for identifications in the nineteenth.

Ibn al-Baytar · Malaga to Damascus, died 1248