26 Spanish exploration in the Age of Discovery

The Spanish colonization of the Americas began under the Crown of Castile and spearheaded by the Spanish conquistadors. The Americas were invaded and incorporated into the Spanish Empire, with the exception of Brazil, British America, and some small regions in South America and the Caribbean. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer this vast territory. The main motivations for colonial expansion were profit through resource extraction and the spread of Catholicism through indigenous conversions.

Amerigo Vespucci's Letter from Seville, written to his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, describes experiences on Alonso de Ojeda's May 1499 voyage. Vespucci's findings during the Age of Discovery led Spain people to believe that North and South America were not connected to Asia, which was a common belief at the time and was even held by Vespucci himself. Despite the surrounding controversy among many historians about which Vespucci letters were real, and which ones were forged, this particular letter of Vespucci's is notable for its detailed description of the Brazilian coast and its inhabitants.

Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, formerly known in English as Peter Martyr of Angleria, was an Italian historian at the service of Spain during the Age of Exploration. He wrote the first accounts of explorations in Central and South America in a series of letters and reports, grouped in the original Latin publications of 1511 to 1530 into sets of ten chapters called "decades." His Decades are of great value in the history of geography and discovery. His De Orbe Novo describes the first contacts of Europeans and Native Americans, Native American civilizations in the Caribbean and North America, as well as Mesoamerica, and includes, for example, the first European reference to India rubber. It was first translated into English in 1555, and in a fuller version in 1912.

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo was an Iberian maritime explorer best known for investigations of the West Coast of North America, undertaken on behalf of the Spanish Empire. He was the first European to explore present-day California, navigating along the coast of California in 1542–1543.

Cartography of Latin America, map-making of the realms in the Western Hemisphere, was an important aim of European powers expanding into the New World. Both the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire began mapping the realms they explored and settled. They also speculated on the lands that were marked terra incognita. Indigenous groups created maps of their territories, some of which predated the arrival of the Europeans. Maps for Spain also projected "its particular sense of order, religion, and justice, or what was understood as policía in its new colonies." Maps could be a form of propaganda; empires used maps as a means to assert sovereignty over territory, even when the situation on the ground did not merit it. The Spanish crown mandated the creation of reports from indigenous towns in New Spain, the Relaciones geográficas, a major state-directed project for gathering information. with written descriptions and usually a map. A useful collection of articles pointing to some major issues in New World cartography has recently appeared. When other European powers began exploring and settling the zones that Spain and Portugal had claimed as their own, maps began to delineate the boundaries between empires. As Latin America nation-states coalesced following independence in the early nineteenth century, map making was a standard national project.

The Casa de Contratación or Casa de la Contratación de las Indias was established by the Crown of Castile, in 1503 in the port of Seville as a crown agency for the Spanish Empire. It functioned until 1790, when it was abolished in a government reorganization. Before the establishment of the Council of the Indies in 1524, the Casa de Contratación had broad powers over overseas matters, especially financial matters concerning trade and legal disputes arising from it. It also was responsible for the licensing of emigrants, training of pilots, creation of maps and charters, probate of estates of Spaniards dying overseas. Its official name was La Casa y Audiencia de Indias.

Charles V was Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria from 1519 to 1556, King of Spain from 1516 to 1556, and Lord of the Netherlands as titular Duke of Burgundy from 1506 to 1555. As he was head of the rising House of Habsburg during the first half of the 16th century, his dominions in Europe included the Holy Roman Empire, extending from Germany to northern Italy with direct rule over the Austrian hereditary lands and the Burgundian Low Countries, and a unified Spain with its southern Italian kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. Furthermore, his reign encompassed both the long-lasting Spanish and the short-lived German colonizations of the Americas. The personal union of the European and American territories of Charles V was the first collection of realms labelled "the empire on which the Sun never sets".

The Columbian exchange, also known as the Columbian interchange, named after Christopher Columbus, was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Americas, the Old World, and West Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. It also relates to European colonization and trade following Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage. Invasive species, including communicable diseases, were a byproduct of the exchange. The changes in agriculture significantly altered global populations. The most significant immediate effects of the Columbian exchange were the cultural exchanges and the transfer of people between continents.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, opening the way for European exploration and colonization of the Americas. His expeditions, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, were the first European contact with the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Conquistadors were the knights, soldiers and explorers of the Spanish and the Portuguese Empires. During the Age of Discovery, conquistadors sailed beyond Europe to the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and Asia, conquering territory and opening trade routes. They brought colonialism to much of the world for Spain and Portugal in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

The Council of the Indies; officially, the Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies, was the most important administrative organ of the Spanish Empire for the Americas and the Philippines. The crown held absolute power over the Indies and the Council of the Indies was the administrative and advisory body for those overseas realms. It was established in 1524 by Charles V to administer "the Indies," Spain's name for its territories. Such an administrative entity, on the conciliar model of the Council of Castile, was created following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521, which demonstrated the importance of the Americas. Originally an itinerary council that followed Charles V, it was subsequently established as an autonomous body with legislative, executive and judicial functions by Philip II of Spain and placed in Madrid in 1561. The Council of the Indies was abolished in 1812 by the Cortes of Cádiz, briefly restored in 1814 by Ferdinand VII of Spain, and definitively abolished in 1834 by the regency, acting on behalf of the four-year-old Isabella II of Spain.

The García de Nodal expedition was chartered in 1619 by King Philip III of Spain to reconnoiter the passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, rounding Cape Horn, south of Tierra del Fuego, just discovered by the Dutch merchants Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten. It was a successful expedition, as all goals were reached. In addition, neither lives nor ships were lost and the whole was done in a small amount of time.

This is a list of sites and peoples visited by the Hernando de Soto Expedition in the years 1539–1543. In May 1539, de Soto left Havana, Cuba, with nine ships, over 620 men and 220 surviving horses and landed at Charlotte Harbor, Florida. This began his three-year odyssey through the Southeastern North American continent, from which de Soto and a large portion of his men would not return.

Isabella I was Queen of Castile from 1474, and Queen consort of Aragon from 1479, reigning over a dynastically unified Spain jointly with her husband Ferdinand II of Aragon until her death; together they would be known as the Catholic Monarchs. Isabella is considered the first Queen of Spain de facto, being described as such during her own lifetime, although Castile and Aragon de jure remained two different kingdoms until the Nueva Planta decrees of 1707 to 1716.

In 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan led a Spanish expedition to find a western route to the East Indies and reach the Moluccas or Spice Islands with a fleet known as the Armada de Molucca. After the death of Magellan in the Philippines in 1521 and following several other short-leaderships, the Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano led the expedition to the Spice Islands and ultimately the return trip to Spain, resulting in the first circumnavigation of the world in 1522. The expedition is therefore known as the Magellan's circumnavigation and also as the Magellan–Elcano circumnavigation.

Álvaro de Mendaña y Neira was a Spanish navigator and discoverer, best known for two of the earliest recorded expeditions across the Pacific in 1567 and 1595. His voyages led to the discovery of the Marquesas, Cook Islands and Solomons among other archipelagos. Born in Congosto, in El Bierzo Region (León), he was the nephew of Lope García de Castro, viceroy of Peru.

The Viceroyalty of New Spain was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. It covered a huge area that included much of North America, northern parts of South America and several Pacific Ocean archipelagos, namely the Philippines and Guam. It originated in 1521 after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the main event of the Spanish conquest, and officially created on 18 August 1521 as a kingdom and later, the first of four viceroyalties Spain created in the Americas. Its first viceroy was Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco, and the capital of the kingdom was Mexico City, established on the ancient Mēxihco-Tenōchtitlan.

Alonzo de Santa Cruz was a Spanish cartographer, mapmaker, instrument maker, historian and teacher. He was born about 1505, and died in November 1567. His maps were inventoried in 1572.

Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest were undertaken several times during the Age of Exploration. Spanish claims to the Pacific Northwest date to the papal bull of 1493, and the Treaty of Tordesillas signed in 1494. In 1513, this claim was reinforced by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean, when he claimed all lands adjoining this ocean for the Spanish Crown. Spain only started to colonize the claimed territory north of present-day Mexico in the 18th century, when it settled the northern coast of Las Californias.

Luís Vaz de Torres, or Luis Váez de Torres in the Spanish spelling, was a 16th- and 17th-century maritime explorer of a Spanish expedition noted for the first recorded European navigation of the strait that separates the Australian mainland from the island of New Guinea, and which now bears his name.

The Treaty of Zaragoza, also called the Capitulation of Zaragoza was a peace treaty between Castile and Portugal, signed on 22 April 1529 by King John III of Portugal and the Castilian emperor Charles V, in the Aragonese city of Zaragoza. The treaty defined the areas of Castilian and Portuguese influence in Asia, in order to resolve the "Moluccas issue", which had arisen because both kingdoms claimed the Maluku Islands for themselves, asserting that they were within their area of influence as specified in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The conflict began in 1520, when expeditions of both kingdoms reached the Pacific Ocean, because no agreed meridian of longitude had been established in the Orient.

The Antonio de Vea expedition of 1675–1676 was a Spanish naval expedition to the fjords and channels of Patagonia aimed to find whether rival colonial powers—specifically, the English—were active in the region. While this was not the first Spanish expedition to the region, it was the largest up to then, involving 256 men, one ocean-going ship, two long boats and nine dalcas. Suspicion about English bases in Patagonia was dispelled by the expedition. Spanish authorities' knowledge of western Patagonia was greatly improved by the expedition, yet Spanish interest in the area waned thereafter until the 1740s.

Victoria was a carrack and the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the world. Victoria was part of a Spanish expedition commanded by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, and after his death during the voyage, by Juan Sebastián Elcano. The expedition began on 10 August 1519 with five ships. However, Victoria was the only ship to complete the voyage, returning on 6 September 1522. Magellan was killed in the Philippines.

Between 1492 and 1504, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus led four Spanish-based transatlantic maritime expeditions to the Americas, a continental landmass which was virtually unknown to and outside of the Old World (Afro-Eurasia). These voyages to America led to the widespread knowledge of its existence. This breakthrough inaugurated the period known as the Age of Discovery, which saw the colonization of the Americas, a related biological exchange, and trans-Atlantic trade. These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are sometimes cited as the beginning of the modern era.

Francis Xavier (born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta; Latin Franciscus Xaverius; Basque: Frantzisko Xabierkoa; Spanish: Francisco Javier; Portuguese: Francisco Xavier;, venerated as Saint Francis Xavier, was a Navarrese Catholic missionary and saint who was the co-founder of the Society of Jesus.