Despite the long-standing cultural importance and botanical interest in Vanilla, many taxa belonging to the genus remain poorly understood. Vanilla species generally have broad geographical and ecological distributions. Most species are found in multiple countries, while local endemics are rare. Many names proposed in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries remain cryptic and unused despite having priority over more recently proposed names. Relatively few Vanilla species have been well-documented, both locally and across their entire distribution range, while a signifcant portion of novelties have been proposed on the basis of very few specimens that are compared only with local foras. After careful inspection of the type materials, living plants, botanical illustrations, photographs and hundreds of additional herbarium specimens of Vanilla we tentatively recognize 62 species for the Neotr...