Geoffrey Groesbeck

One could say travel runs in Geoff's family. A descendant of the hardy souls who founded much of New England, eastern Canada and further afield (French Guiana, anyone?), Geoff spent his formative years alternating between Portugal's relentlessly sunny Algarve coast and Massachusetts' occasionally sunny North Shore.

Between incessant trips abroad, Geoff studied Japanese at Harvard and technology transfer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He switched gears after university, walking a fine line between jaunts in global finance and financing global jaunts, before deciding upon the latter as an infinitely preferable vocation.

Geoff has written and lectured extensively on Mexico, Paraguay and Bolivia - in particular its remote and beautiful Chiquitania. Considered one of the world's leading experts on the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos, his writings, photography, and Web site on the region have won international acclaim.

Author and co-author of several best-selling cultural travel guides and regional histories, and specialist contributor to several others, Geoff's works have been translated into 12 languages to date. His articles and photographs also have appeared in some of the world's best-known magazines, newspapers, and academic journals.

Geoff's most recent Footprint titles, Paraguay Handbook (3rd ed.); Paraguay Focus Guide (1st ed.); and Guadalajara & Pacific Focus Guide (1st ed.) were published in Europe and North America in 2015, 2014 and 2011 respectively. Other major titles include the 2nd ed. of Mexico Handbook; the 17th ed. of Mexico & Central America Handbook; the 3rd, 4th and 6th eds. of Bolivia Handbook; and the 1st and 2nd eds. of Peru Bolivia & Ecuador. He also is a long-time specialist contributor to Footprint's venerable South American Handbook.

In addition, Geoff has been a South American specialist contributor to Dorling-Kindersley Travel titles, including the widely acclaimed The Road Less Travelled and Where to Go and When in the Americas, as well as Phaidon Press' Art & Place: Site-specific Art of the Americas.

When not in Latin America, Geoff still makes an annual pilgrimage to Maine's Mt. Desert Island, where his family has summered off and on since discovering the island for France in 1604.