Castile’s Indies began on Hispaniola in 1493
Spanish settlement of the Americas opened in 1493 on Hispaniola after Columbus’s 1492 voyage under Isabella of Castile. Crown civil and church structures claimed vast jurisdictions until 1898, while roughly 1.86 million Spaniards migrated between 1492 and 1832—and Indigenous numbers crashed.
Isabella and Ferdinand completed Granada’s conquest on 1 January 1492, ordered Jewish expulsion on 31 March, and backed Columbus, who left Palos on 3 August and made landfall on 12 October. Permanent settlement followed in 1493. Castile funded the enterprise; the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas split Iberian claims with Portugal, while Alexander VI’s Inter caetera (4 May 1493) tied title to Christianization. Other Europeans ignored the deal; Brazil became Portugal’s South American foothold.
Scholars note “colony” was uncommon before the later eighteenth century; the crown long said “the Indies.” About 250,000 Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, with most of the 1492–1832 total later, especially under Bourbon encouragement. An estimated eighty percent Indigenous population loss in the first century and a half after contact is attributed mainly to disease, compounded by forced labor, resettlement, and enslavement. Africans were imported early in the Caribbean as Indigenous labor collapsed; a mixed casta society grew under Spanish rule.
Caribbean patterns set the template: Columbus still believed he had reached Asia, so peoples were labeled “Indians.” La Navidad was abandoned; La Isabela rose on Hispaniola. Without Aztec- or Inca-scale states, conquest was uneven but encomienda grants put Taíno labor to gold panning—slavery in practice until Isabel declared Indigenous vassals. Taíno numbers on Hispaniola fell from hundreds of thousands or millions (estimates vary) to near wipeout by the mid-1490s; raids then spread demographic catastrophe to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Leaders Enriquillo and Hatuey became symbols of resistance.
Entradas after Columbus were usually privately financed expeditions under adelantados who shared spoils by stake—Cortés and Pizarro the famous empire-breakers. Independence wars ended most mainland rule in the early nineteenth century; Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines fell to the United States in 1898.
Source: Spanish colonization of the Americas
