“…Xanthene derivatives can be prepared by several methods: cyclodehydration (Bekaert et al, 1992), the trapping of benzynes by phenols (Knight & Little, 2001), the palladium-catalysed cyclisation of polycyclic aryltriflate esters (Wang & Harvey, 2002), a simple and efficient procedure for the synthesis of xanthene derivatives through one-pot condensation of 2-naphthol with aryl aldehydes in the presence of niobium pentachloride (Bartolomeu et al, 2014), the condensation of cyclohexane-1,3-diones and aromatic aldehydes in the presence of solid acids (Karami et al, 2013a), amongst others (Horning & Horning, 1946;John et al, 2006;Saini et al, 2006;Zhang & Tao 2008;Zhang & Liu, 2008;Wang et al, 2008;Urinda et al, 2009;Lü et al, 2009;Maleki et al, 2011;Soleimani et al, 2011;Pramanik & Bhar, 2012;Dharma Rao et al, 2012;Karami et al, 2013bKarami et al, , 2013aKarami et al, , 2014Li et al, 2013;Cao et al, 2013;Shirini et al, 2013;Iniyavan et al, *Corresponding author, e-mail: lcsilva@fc.unesp.br 2014; Shirini et al, 2014Shirini et al, , 2015Preetam et al, 2015;Ilangovan et al, 2011). However, some of these methods involve long reaction times, extreme reaction conditions, expensive reagents and unsatisfactory yields, hence the improvement of these syntheses has been the target of several studies.…”