Paul Ernst Emil Sintenis (4 April 1847 Seidenberg, Oberlausitz, Prussia – 6 March 1907) was a German botanist, pharmacist and important plant collector.
He studied at the gymnasium in Görlitz, became a pharmacist's apprentice in 1863 and worked as such in several German cities.
After further pharmaceutical studies in Breslau (now Wrocław) and another short stint as pharmacist, he spent the rest of his professional life as a plant collector.
Sintenis arrived in Puerto Rico in October 1884 and, supported by Leopold Krug, remained there until June 1887.
The first set of his Puerto Rican collections was mostly destroyed at Dahlem (Berlin) during the Second World War, but duplicates survived in all major herbaria, primarily Kew, the British Museum, Harvard, New York Botanical Garden, and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.