Despite being globally popular for its fragrant fruits, Vanilla is scarcely understood from an evolutionary standpoint. For example, its current intra-classification relies on informal morphological groups supported by only a few DNA regions, which have proven to be paraphyletic. Additionally, there has been no attempt to reconstruct its biogeographical history in the species-rich Neotropical clades. My project aims to address these issues by (a) proposing a well-resolved phylogeny based on broad taxon and DNA sampling and (b) estimating when and where Neotropical Vanilla lineages originated.