Who were the explorers of Spain?

Famous Spanish explorers

  • Hernán Cortés (1485 – 1547)
  • Fransisco Pizarro (1478 – 1541)
  • Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475 – 1519)
  • Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490 – 1559)
  • Juan Ponce de León (1460 – 1521)
  • Hernando de Soto (1497 – 1542)

Who was the Spanish explorer?

Soon after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, the Spanish began to hear stories of civilizations with immense riches. Hoping to claim this wealth and territory for Spain and themselves, conquistadors, or “conquerors,” sailed across the Atlantic Ocean.

What are Spanish explorers called?

conquistadores

Spanish explorers with hopes of conquest in the New World were known as conquistadores.

Who were the Spanish explorers and what did they explore?

Spanish Explorers After Columbus



Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition (in the course of which he put down a mutiny and was later killed) sailed around the tip of South America, across the Pacific to the Philippines, through the Indian Ocean and back to Europe around the southern tip of Africa between 1519 and 1522.

Who was the biggest Spanish explorer?

The two most famous conquistadors were Hernán Cortés who conquered the Aztec Empire and Francisco Pizarro who led the conquest of the Inca Empire. They were second cousins born in Extremadura, where many of the Spanish conquerors were born.

Who were 4 explorers from Spain?

Some of the most famous explorers are Juan Ponce de León, Ferdinand Magellan, Hernando Cortés, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Hernando de Soto. Each one of these explorers played and important role in the colonizing and exploration of the Americas.

Who is the most famous explorer?

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506). Famous Italian explorer and arguably the best-known explorer that ever lived. Known for “discovering” America in 1492, although he believed the landmass was a part of Asia.

Why did they explore Spain?

Their goals were to expand Catholicism and to gain a commercial advantage over Portugal. To those ends, Ferdinand and Isabella sponsored extensive Atlantic exploration. Spain’s most famous explorer, Christopher Columbus, was actually from Genoa, Italy.

Why did people explore Spain?

Only late in the 15th century did an emerging modern Spain become fully committed to the search for new trade routes overseas. In 1492, Christopher Columbus’s expedition was funded in the hope of bypassing Portugal’s monopoly on west African sea routes, to reach “the Indies.”

Who discovered Spain?

Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians



By 1100 b.C. Phoenicians arrived to the peninsula and founded colonies, the most important of which was Gadir (today’s Cadiz), Malaca (today’s Malaga) and Abdera (today’s Adra, in Almeria). Also Greeks founded colonies in southern Spain and along the Mediterranean coast.

Who was the first Spanish explorer?

Juan Ponce de León was the first Spanish explorer to set foot in the southeastern United States. He was born ca. 1460 into a noble family.

Who is the Spanish explorer who discovered the Philippines?

Ferdinand Magellan

Although Ferdinand Magellan had discovered the Philippine archipelago in 1521, no European settlements had been made there, so Luis de Velasco, the viceroy of New Spain, sent Legazpi to claim it in 1564.

Was Christopher Columbus a Spanish explorer?

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who stumbled upon the Americas and whose journeys marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic colonization.

Was Vespucci a Spanish explorer?

Contents. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian-born merchant and explorer who took part in early voyages to the New World on behalf of Spain around the late 15th century.

Who was first Columbus or Vespucci?

He sailed in 1499, seven years after Columbus first landed in the West Indies. Vespucci made trips in 1499 and 1502, and possibly a third in 1503. During his first voyage, he explored the Northern Coast of South America to well beyond the mouth of the Amazon.

Why is America not called Vespucci?

In 1507 the cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller made one of the first maps to depict the “New World” and he was under the mistaken impression that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered the the land mass and so he named the southern part of the continent, “America”,he later on found out about his error and deleted Vespucci’s