He afterwards visited Paris and London for the purpose of extending his scientific knowledge, and on his return to Bogotá founded a college for the higher branches of science, where he delivered lectures on chemistry, his favorite subject, and the theme of several of his published monographs.

Uricoechea was also an able philologist, and while in Bogotá made many excursions to collect materials for the study of the languages and archaeology of extinct peoples.

While residing in Spain and Morocco, he made such progress in Arabic that when a chair of that language was founded in the University of Brussels, he was assigned as professor.

He had only accomplished the work appropriate to his new chair a translation into French of Carl Paul Caspari's Arabic Grammar, when he died of dysentery, in Beirut, then part of the Ottoman Empire, on July 28, 1880.

He was also the author of various works on the antiquities and native languages of Spanish America, and of a valuable catalogue of the maps relating to the same region.