Juan Sebastián Elcano was a Basque navigator, subject of the Kingdom of Castile. He is best known for completing the first world circumnavigation in History. Elcano was a naval commander subject of Charles I of Castile and he completed the...

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés was a Spanish historian and writer. He is commonly known as "Oviedo" even though his family name is Fernández. He participated in the Spanish colonization of the Caribbean, and wrote a long chronicle of...

Sebastián de Belalcázar was a Spanish conquistador. He took the name Belalcázar as that was the name of the castle-town near to his birthplace in Córdoba. According to various sources, he may have left for the New World with Christopher Col...

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who organised the Spanish expedition to the East Indies that resulted in the first circumnavigation of the Earth, completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano. He was born in a still disputed location i...

Giovanni da Verrazzano was an Italian explorer of North America, in the service of the French crown. He is renowned as the first European since the Norse expeditions to North America around AD 1000 to explore the Atlantic coast of North Ame...

Pedro de Alvarado y Contreras was a Spanish conquistador and governor of Guatemala. He participated in the conquest of Cuba, in Juan de Grijalva's exploration of the coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and in the conquest of Mexico le...

Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro, 1st Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca was a Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Cas...

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer of the New World, and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. During eight years of traveling across what is now the US Southwest, he became a trader and faith healer to variou...

Antonio Pigafetta was an Italian navigator born in Vicenza. He paid a large sum of money to accompany and assist the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan and his Spanish crew on their trip around the world. He kept an accurate journal of t...

Jacques Cartier was a French navigator who first explored and described the Gulf of St-Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named Canada. In 1534, Jacques Cartier set sail hoping to discover a western passage to the...

Joannes Leo Africanus, or al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, was a Moorish diplomat and author who is best known for his book Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) describing the geography of North Africa. Most of what is k...

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada was a Spanish explorer and conquistador in Colombia. He explored the northern part of South America. While successful in many of his exploits, acquiring massive amounts of gold and emeralds, he ended his career di...

Friar Andrés de Urdaneta was a Spanish circumnavigator, explorer and Augustinian friar. As a navigator he achieved in 1536 the "second" world circumnavigation (after the first one led by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano and thei...

Ambrosius Ehinger, also (Ambrosio Alfínger in Spanish) was a German conquistador and the first governor of the Welser concession, also known as “Little Venice”, in New Granada, now Venezuela and Colombia. Ehinger was a factor in Madrid for...

Pedro Gutiérrez de Valdivia or Valdiva was a Spanish conquistador and the first royal governor of Chile. After serving with the Spanish army in Italy and Flanders, he was sent to South America in 1534, where he served as lieutenant under Fr...