Garcia da Orta was born in Castelo de Vide, Portugal, the son of Fernando (Isaac) da Orta and Leonor Gomes around 1499 A.D. In 1523, he studied medicine at Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares before returning to Portugal. He sailed to Goa in the year 1534, where he settled and was employed as a physician. He also was trading in spices and precious stones.

Not much of his writings on Vijayanagara are available since he was a friend of Burhan Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar and did much of his trading and medicinal study in Goa itself which was then a Portuguese colony in India. However, with his close link to trading in precious stones, he has made this extraordinary recording of "a diamond had been seen at Vijayanagara as large as a small hen's egg," and he even declares the weights of three others to have been respectively 120, 148, and 250 MANGELIS, equivalent to 150, 175, and 312 1/2 carats, giving us the size of diamonds that were traded on the streets of Hampi Bazaar.

Garcia da Orta is also named as the father of European practise of Indian medicinal plants. His book "on the Simples and Drugs of India" published in the year 1568 puts forth a many diseases and the medicinal plants used to cure them. While in India, he met a lot of Vaidyas and Hakims and also practised medicine with them. He died in Goa of serious illness in the year 1568.