Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa who completed four Spanish-based voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and European colonization of the Americas. His expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.
Hispaniola is an island in the Caribbean that is part of the Greater Antilles. Hispaniola is the most populous island in the West Indies, and the region's second largest in area, after the island of Cuba. The 76,192-square-kilometre (29,418 sq mi) island is divided into two separate nations: the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic (48,445 km2 to the east and the French/Haitian Creole-speaking Haiti (27,750 km2 to the west. The only other divided island in the Caribbean is Saint Martin, which is shared between France and the Netherlands.
Year 1492 (MCDXCII) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
Columbus Day is a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and elsewhere, and a federal holiday in the United States, which officially celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas. Columbus went ashore at Guanahaní, an island in the Bahamas, on October 12, 1492. On his return in 1493, Columbus moved his coastal base of operations 70 miles east to the island of Hispaniola, what is now the Dominican Republic and established the settlement of La Isabela, the first permanent Spanish settlement in the Americas.
Nord-Ouest (French) or Nòdwès is one of the ten departments of Haiti as well as the northernmost one. It has an area of 2,102.88 km2 (811.93 sq mi) and a population of 728,807. Its capital is Port-de-Paix.
Baracoa, whose full original name is: Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa, is a municipality and city in Guantánamo Province near the eastern tip of Cuba. It was visited by Admiral Christopher Columbus on November 27, 1492, and then founded by the first governor of Cuba, the Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar on August 15, 1511. It is the oldest Spanish settlement in Cuba and was its first capital.
Juan de la Cosa was a Castilian navigator and cartographer, known for designing the earliest European world map which incorporated the territories of the Americas discovered in the 15th century. De la Cosa was the owner and master of the Santa María, and thus played an important role in the first and second voyage of Christopher Columbus to the West Indies.
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was a Spanish navigator and explorer, the youngest of the Pinzón brothers. Along with his older brother, Martín Alonso Pinzón, who captained the Pinta, he sailed with Christopher Columbus on the first voyage to the New World, in 1492, as captain of the Niña.
Guanahaní was the Taíno name of an island in the Bahamas that was the first land in the New World sighted and visited by Christopher Columbus' first voyage, on 12 October 1492. It is a bean-shaped island that Columbus called San Salvador. Guanahaní has traditionally been identified with Watlings Island, which was officially renamed San Salvador Island in 1925 as a result, but modern scholars are divided on the accuracy of this identification and several alternative candidates in and around the southern Bahamas have been proposed as well.
La Niña was one of the three Spanish ships used by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in his first voyage to the West Indies in 1492. As was tradition for Spanish ships of the day, she bore a female saint's name, Santa Clara. However, she was commonly referred to by her nickname, La Niña, which was probably a pun on the name of her owner, Juan Niño of Moguer. She was a standard caravel-type vessel.
Holguín is a municipality-city in Cuba. After Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Camagüey, it is the fourth largest city in Cuba.
La Isabela in Puerto Plata Province, Dominican Republic was the first stable Spanish settlement and town in the Americas established in December 1493. The site is 42 km west of the city of Puerto Plata, adjacent to the village of El Castillo. The area now forms a National Historic Park.
Between 1492 and 1504, the Italian navigator and explorer Christopher Columbus led four transatlantic maritime expeditions in the name of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain to the Caribbean and to Central and South America. These voyages led to the widespread knowledge of the New World. This breakthrough inaugurated the period known as the Age of Discovery, which saw the colonization of the Americas, a related biological exchange, and trans-Atlantic trade. These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era.
The Captaincy General of Santo Domingo was the first Capitancy in the New World, established by Spain in 1492 on the island of Hispaniola. The Capitancy, under the jurisdiction of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, was granted administrative powers over the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and most of its mainland coasts, making Santo Domingo the principal political entity of the early colonial period.
A letter written by Christopher Columbus on February 15, 1493, is the first known document announcing the results of his first voyage that set out in 1492 and reached the Americas. The letter was ostensibly written by Columbus himself, aboard the caravel Niña, on the return leg of his voyage. A postscript was added upon his arrival in Lisbon on March 4, 1493, and it was probably from there that Columbus dispatched two copies of his letter to the Spanish court.
The Niño Brothers were a family of sailors and conquistadors from the town of Moguer at the end of the 15th century, who participated actively in Christopher Columbus's first voyage—generally considered to constitute the discovery of the Americas by Europeans—and other subsequent voyages to the New World.
The Taíno were a historic Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, whose culture has been continued today by Taíno descendant communities and Taíno revivalist communities. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of what is now Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and the northern Lesser Antilles. The Lucayan branch of the Taíno were the first New World peoples encountered by Christopher Columbus, in the Bahama Archipelago on October 12, 1492. The Taíno spoke a dialect of the Arawakan language group. They lived in agricultural societies ruled by caciques with fixed settlements and a matrilineal system of kinship and inheritance. Taíno religion centered on the worship of zemis.
The Columbian Viceroyalty, Viceroyalty of the Indies or First Viceroyalty in the Indies is the name that designates the number of titles and rights granted to Christopher Columbus by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 on the lands discovered and undiscovered, before embarking on his first trip that culminated in the colonization of the Americas.
The Harp and the Shadow is a novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier. The novel was first published in 1979. Consisting of three parts, The Harp, The Hand and The Shadow, the book describes many historic characters, including pope Pius IX, Christopher Columbus and pope Leo XIII.
The Columbus Murals are a series of twelve murals depicting Christopher Columbus, painted in the 1880s by Luigi Gregori and displayed in the Main Building at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US. The murals have been a source of controversy in recent decades for their romanticized portrayal of Columbus and his relationship with Native Americans.
