When the Europeans reached America in 1492, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (c. AD 70) was, in Europe, the model for describing nature. How did it influence the first descriptions of the nature of America published in Europe? I will investigate the dynamics of transferring knowledge from the American to the European continent, by focusing on the works by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1476- 1557), who was one of the first Europeans who went to America and wrote about it. In particular, I will ask to what extent characteristic Plinian methods of acquiring and transmitting knowledge (including autopsy, use of local sources, anecdotal narrations, selection and organization of information, aesthetic and religious values of nature, concepts of wonder and otherness) shaped the standards, structures, concepts, and methods that made the knowledge of the nature of America accessible to the European, Latin-influenced culture in the early modern period.