Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (Santarém, c. 1500 – 1559 in Coimbra) was a Portuguese historian in the early Renaissance.

His "History of the discovery and conquest of India", full of geographic and ethnographic objective information, was widely translated throughout Europe.

There he remained ten years, from 1528 to 1538, during which he gathered as much information as he could about the discovery and conquest of India by the Portuguese, in order to write a book on the subject.

In 1538, he returned to Portugal, having collected from written and oral sources material for his great historical work.

His work, full of geographic and ethnographic information, was soon widely translated throughout Europe, first into French by Nicolas de Grouchy,[5] a teacher at the University, Spanish (1554), Italian (1578) and English (1582).