[2][3] The species was introduced to Europe in the summer of 1855 by Marius Porte who discovered it on the banks of the Amazon River near Moyobamba, Peru.

[5] The Veitch Nurseries followed Linden and labelled their plants of this species as E. amazonica, but William Jackson Hooker mistook this nomen nudum as an unpublished invention and misidentified the Veitch's plants as E. grandiflora (namely Urceolina × grandiflora) in 1857.

[7] Hooker's misidentification and Planchon's ambiguous opinion led the subsequent botanists to treat E. amazonica as a synonym of E.

[8] Although Alan Meerow and Bijan Dehgan in 1984 corrected this mistake,[8] the long-time confusion between the two species has persisted and U. amazonica is still frequently misidentified as U.

[9] This placement was confirmed in a 2020 molecular phylogenetic study in which it is shown that Eucharis and Urceolina are part of a single clade with extensive ancestral reticulation.