The prickly pear fruit is called “tuna” because that’s what the Taíno people of the Caribbean called it long before Europeans arrived. Spanish colonizers adopted the word directly from Taíno languages during the 1500s, and it has been the standard Spanish name for the fruit ever since. It has no connection whatsoever to tuna fish.
A Taíno Word, Not a Spanish One
When Spanish explorers reached the Caribbean in the late 1400s and early 1500s, they encountered Indigenous peoples already eating cactus fruit. The Taíno, who inhabited much of the Caribbean, had their own word for it: tuna. Spanish colonizers borrowed the term wholesale during Mexico’s early colonial period, and it stuck. By 1528, the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca was using “tunas” in his written accounts of life among the Apache in what is now the American Southwest, describing how their best times came when “tunas are ripe, because then they have plenty to eat and spend the time in dancing and eating day and night.”
The word entered Spanish so thoroughly that it remains the everyday term across Mexico and much of Latin America today. It’s not slang or a regional nickname. The U.S. Department of Agriculture actually lists “Tuna” as an approved name for the species Opuntia ficus-indica, the most widely cultivated prickly pear cactus.
Tuna Is the Fruit, Not the Cactus
One detail that trips people up: “tuna” refers specifically to the fruit, not the flat cactus pads. Those pads have their own name, “nopales,” and they’re eaten as a vegetable in Mexican cooking. The tuna is the oval, fleshy berry that grows on the edges of the pads, typically covered in tiny spines of its own. Tunas range from about the size of a plum to roughly the size of a kiwi, depending on the species.
Mexico is the world’s center of cactus diversity, with the cactus family containing over 1,000 species. The genus Opuntia, which includes all prickly pears, produces the bulk of cactus fruit sold in Mexican markets. Both the pads (nopales) and the fruits (tunas) are staple ingredients, appearing in everything from salads to juices to candies.
Different Colors, Different Flavors
Not all tunas taste the same. The two most common varieties are red-skinned and yellow-skinned, and their flavor profiles differ noticeably. Red tunas, which have a dark pink interior, contain the most vitamin C of any prickly pear fruit type. That gives them a citrusy, bright flavor. Yellow tunas contain more carotenoids (the same pigments found in carrots and sweet potatoes) and tend to have a milder, slightly more vegetal taste.
There’s also a variety called xoconostle, which is sour rather than sweet and gets used in savory dishes and sauces rather than eaten as a snack. The sweet varieties are typically eaten fresh, blended into drinks, or made into jams and desserts.
The Name Changes Depending on Where You Are
While “tuna” dominates in Mexico and much of Latin America, the fruit goes by completely different names elsewhere. In Spain, it’s called “higo chumbo” or “chumbera.” In parts of North Africa and the Mediterranean, where the cactus was introduced by Spanish and Portuguese traders, it’s known as “Barbary fig” or “Indian fig,” a nod to the European confusion about where exactly Columbus had landed. The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew notes that on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, prickly pears are called “tungi,” and locals distill them into a spirit by the same name.
The USDA’s list of common names for the species reads like a world atlas: “figuier de Barbarie” in French, “feigenkaktus” in German, “palma gigante” in parts of South America, and “tuna mansa” (gentle tuna) or “tuna de Castilla” in regions that distinguish cultivated varieties from wild ones. English settled on “prickly pear,” a name that describes the spiny exterior and the vaguely pear-like shape of the fruit, sidestepping the Taíno word entirely.
Why the Confusion With Fish
The English word “tuna” for the fish comes from a completely separate linguistic path. It derives from the Spanish “atún,” which traces back through Arabic to Latin and Greek words for the large ocean fish. The Taíno word for cactus fruit and the Mediterranean word for a saltwater fish just happen to sound identical in English, a coincidence of two unrelated languages colliding in the same colonial language. In Spanish, the distinction is clear: the fruit is “tuna,” the fish is “atún.” The overlap only causes confusion in English, where both words lost their distinguishing features.