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Christopher Columbus's first voyage with the Niña, Pinta and the Santa Maria began on August 3, 1492. On October 12, 1492 a sailor on the Pinta shouted “Land!” Christopher Columbus and his crew were actually seeing the island of San Salvador, 375 miles off of the coast of Florida. -
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On June 24, 1497, Cabot and his crew aboard the Matthew reached North America—either Labrador, Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. -
The first diocese in the New World was established in 1511 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. -
In 1521 Ponce de León sailed again for Florida, with two ships and 200 men, and landed near Charlotte Harbor. -
Cortés and his crew reached Mexico in February of 1519. They dropped anchor at Tabasco, where he gained intelligence from locals about the land he desired to conquer. They also gave him gifts in the form of 20 women. One of them, Marina, became his wife and they had a son, Martín, together. -
Franciscan missionaries were the first to arrive in New Spain, in 1523, following the Cortes expeditions in Mexico, and soon after began establishing missions across the continents. -
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Cabeza de Vaca, who lived from about 1490 to around 1557, was the first European to explore North America and leave a written record. -
Some nine million Aztecs were converted to Christ by the power of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. At that time, the Aztec peoples were practicing human sacrifice. As a result of the image's presence among the people, their hearts were converted to the true God and the practice of human sacrifice was abolished.
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The Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego, a man of Aztec descent who had converted to Christianity, on December 9, 1531. She asked Juan Diego to build a shrine on the spot where she had appeared, Tepeyac Hill, now in a suburb of Mexico City. -
On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer and conquistador, springs a trap on the Incan emperor, Atahualpa.
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Sublimis Deus, meaning The sublime God; is a bull promulgated by Pope Paul III on June 2, 1537, which forbids the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. -
In 1539, two years after their departure from Spain, De Soto and his crew landed on the west coast of Florida in the area historians believe is the location of present day Tampa. -
In 1540, Coronado led a major Spanish expedition up Mexico's western coast and into the region that is now the southwestern United States. -
It shows Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando De Soto (1500–1542), riding a white horse and dressed in Renaissance finery, arriving at the Mississippi River at a point below Natchez on May 8, 1541. De Soto was the first European documented to have seen the river. -
He was killed in Kansas in 1542 by Native Americans, and is considered to be one of the first Christian martyrs in the U.S. -
In 1542, due to the constant protests of Las Casas and others, the Council of the Indies wrote and King Charles V enacted the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians. The New Laws abolished Indian slavery and also ended the encomienda system.
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Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is an account written by the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in 1542 (published in 1552) about the mistreatment of and atrocities committed against the indigenous peoples of the Americas in colonial times and sent to then Prince Philip II of Spain. -
The Dominican Fr. Luís de Cancer, the proto-martyr of Florida, is the subject of a stained glass window in the Dominican church of St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City as well as in the church of Espiritu Santo in Safety Harbor, Florida.
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Founded in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African-American origin in the United States. -
Santa Fe is the oldest capital city in United States and the oldest European community west of the Mississippi. While Santa Fe was inhabited on a very small scale in 1607, it was truly settled by the conquistador Don Pedro de Peralta in 1609-1610. -