Spanish Explorers

Spanish explorers were some of the first Europeans to visit the place now called Colorado. First arriving in North America in the early 1500s, they came looking for gold and silver, and later, for land to settle. But contact with the Spanish forever changed the lives of the Indigenous people who already lived here. Diseases, along with violent campaigns led by Spanish conquistadors, nearly wiped out some Indigenous communities. Spanish settlers followed the conquistadors, taking over the lands that Native peoples called home. Over hundreds of years, Spanish and Indigenous language, culture, religion and food ways have blended, creating a unique culture that only exists in the U.S. Southwest.

Christopher Columbus (1490s)

In 1492, the Spanish government hired Italian cartographer and sailor Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus) to find new ways of accessing the silk and spice trade in southern Asia. But instead of finding southern Asia, Columbus stumbled on the North and South American continents. Columbus became a wealthy man, profiting from the role he was given in overseeing new Spanish colonies in the Americas. As leader of the new colonies, Columbus started a brutal campaign of extermination and enslavement against the Indigenous peoples living in the Americas. Even some at the time, such as the priest Bartolome De Las Casas, wrote to the king of Spain and religious leaders to protest Columbus’s brutal treatment of Native peoples. Generations of explorers followed in his footsteps, bringing weapons and diseases that destroyed entire populations of Indigenous peoples.