Bernardino de Ávila Girón was a Spanish merchant and notary who lived in Japan between 1594 and 1619. He traveled from Spain to Manila around 1583, took up residence in Nagasaki and was living there when six missionaries and twenty Japanese were crucified on February 5, 1597. He witnessed the persecution of Christians after the edict of expulsion of European missionaries on February 14, 1614. Based on these experiences and his observation of Japanese customs, he wrote the Relación del reyno del Nippon al que llaman corruptamente Jappon, the only secular account written in Spanish about Japan and the failed expansion of Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.