The Spanish Empire was a colonial empire that lasted from Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 until Spain left Western Sahara in 1976. It was ruled from Castile by the Habsburgs and then the Bourbons. At its greatest extent, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it covered about 13.7 million km² (5.3 million sq mi): most of South and Central America, Mexico, much of what is now the western and southern United States, Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, and enclaves in Africa. It grew on American silver from Potosí in Bolivia and from Zacatecas and Guanajuato in Mexico. Two permanent ocean routes carried that silver, the Atlantic treasure fleet and the Manila galleon, and they tied Europe, the Americas and China into one trading system. The empire declined through debt, war in Europe, the loss of its European lands between 1648 and 1713, Napoleon’s seizure of the Spanish crown in 1808 and the independence wars that ended at Ayacucho in 1824. Its last American colonies and the Philippines were lost to the United States in 1898.
Castile, Aragon and the Atlantic Gamble of 1492
The empire began with the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, which joined their two crowns under one dynasty, the Trastámara. In 1492 they completed the conquest of the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim state in Iberia. That same year Isabella backed Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor, to sail west in search of the Indies. Castile already had an Atlantic foothold. Its conquest of the Canary Islands began in 1402 and was completed by force between 1478 and 1496. By 1504 more than 90 percent of the native Guanche population had been killed or enslaved, a pattern that would be repeated across the ocean.
Portugal was the rival. It had held Ceuta since 1415 and was colonising Madeira and the Azores, and the Treaty of Alcáçovas of 1479 had shut Castile out of the Guinea trade. Columbus’s return was followed by the first major Spanish settlement in the New World in 1493, and in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) the two crowns divided the world: Africa and Asia went to Portugal and the western lands to Castile. In 1503 the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) was set up in Seville to license and tax every ship bound for the Indies.
Tenochtitlan, Cajamarca and the Conquest of Two Empires
For a quarter of a century Spain held only Caribbean islands. Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded Baracoa on Cuba in 1511. The big growth came on the mainland. In 1519 Hernán Cortés sailed for Mexico with about 550 men. With tens of thousands of Tlaxcalan and other Indigenous allies he besieged the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, which fell in 1521. The Viceroyalty of New Spain was created in 1535, and by 1528 most of the major Maya kingdoms had already been subjugated. The state Cortés destroyed is described in our guide to the Aztec Empire’s geography.
In 1532 Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa in a surprise attack at Cajamarca, and thousands of Inca subjects were killed. The Viceroyalty of Peru followed in 1542 and governed western South America from Lima. The road network the conquerors took over is covered in our Inca Empire geography guide.
The human cost was enormous. Estimates of the population of Mexico, Central America and South America in 1492 vary widely, but even the lowest give a fall of about 80 percent by the end of the 17th century, to roughly nine million people by 1650. Epidemic disease did most of the killing. In New Spain the cocoliztli epidemics, the largest beginning in 1545 and 1576, are estimated to have killed 5–15 million people during the 16th century. War, enslavement and forced labour added to the toll.
Potosí Silver and the Manila Galleon: The Engine of Growth
Conquest became an empire because of what lay under the Andes. Tradition credits Diego Huallpa, an Indigenous prospector, with finding the Cerro Rico, the “rich mountain” above Potosí, in 1545. The mining town founded there that year later grew to more than 200,000 people. In the second half of the 16th century the mountain is estimated to have produced about 60 percent of all the silver mined in the world. Output recovered after the easy surface ores ran out around 1565, thanks to the patio process, which used mercury to draw silver out of low-grade ore. The crown held the monopoly on mercury and took a “royal fifth” (quinto real), or 20 percent, of mining profits. Much of the labour came through the mita, a rotating draft of forced work that required Indigenous communities to send men to the mines.
Llama and mule trains carried the silver down to the Pacific. Ships took it to Panama City, mules hauled it across the isthmus to Portobelo, and the Atlantic treasure fleet (flota) carried it to Seville. From 1566 to 1790 these convoys were the first permanent transatlantic trade route in history. A whole silver fleet was captured only once, by the Dutch privateer Piet Hein in 1628.
The Pacific route grew out of the Magellan–Elcano expedition of 1519–1522, the first voyage around the world. Ruy López de Villalobos named the islands after Prince Philip, the future Philip II, in 1542–1543, and Miguel López de Legazpi began colonising the Philippines in 1565. That same year Andrés de Urdaneta found the eastbound return route, which used the Kuroshio Current to reach Acapulco. From 1565 to 1815 the Manila galleons carried American silver west to buy Chinese silk and porcelain, because silver was worth far more in Asia. Most of their crews were Filipino. The city at the western end of the route is covered in our guide to Manila.
13.7 Million Square Kilometres: The Empire in the Late 1700s
For a time the empire also grew through inheritance. Philip II confirmed his hold on Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and Milan at the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. In 1580 he took the Portuguese crown, and that Iberian Union lasted until 1640, putting coastal Brazil and Portugal’s enclaves in Africa and India under the same king as Mexico and Peru. Reach on this scale is why the monarchy became known as “the empire on which the sun never sets”.
The greatest land area came later, under the Bourbons. By then the European lands were gone, but the American lands had been filled in. New Granada became a viceroyalty in 1717, covering modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, and Río de la Plata followed in 1776, covering roughly Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and northern Chile. France ceded Louisiana in 1763, and from 1778 comercio libre let American ports trade with any port in Spain. By the late 1700s the empire reached about 13.7 million km², from the Strait of Magellan to California and from Manila to Spanish Guinea in Africa.
In 1717–18 the Council of the Indies and the House of Trade moved from Seville to Cádiz. In 1785 Charles III turned Seville’s old merchants’ exchange, designed by Juan de Herrera, into the Archive of the Indies, which UNESCO listed as a World Heritage Site in 1987.
Bankruptcies, the 1588 Armada and the European Losses of 1648–1713
Silver did not make Spain rich. With little manufacturing of its own, Spain passed much of its bullion on to bankers in Genoa and to suppliers in the Netherlands, France and England, and the Habsburgs spent the rest on wars across Europe. Charles V left Philip II debts of about 36 million ducats. Philip defaulted in 1557, 1560, 1575 and 1596, and his successors defaulted six more times over the next 65 years.
Military defeats came alongside the money trouble. In 1588 the Armada sailed from Lisbon to invade England. English fireships scattered it off Calais and storms wrecked it on the way home. In the Peace of Münster (30 January 1648) Spain recognised the independent Dutch Republic, and Portugal had already broken away in 1640. The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) gave France Roussillon and Artois. The Treaties of Utrecht (1713) put the Bourbon Philip V on the throne but took away the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, Sardinia, Sicily, Gibraltar and Menorca. Utrecht also gave British merchants the asiento, a 30-year right to sell enslaved Africans in Spanish America, which they used as cover for smuggling.
The Americas held, though Dutch, English and French forces took small Caribbean islands and used them as smuggling bases. Fortresses such as El Morro in San Juan, begun in 1539, were built up to guard the treasure routes. Even so, Britain captured both Havana and Manila late in the Seven Years’ War.
From Bayonne in 1808 to Ayacucho in 1824: The Mainland Breaks Away
The collapse began in Europe. In 1808 Napoleon forced the Spanish royal family to give up the throne at Bayonne and made his brother Joseph king. Juntas formed on both sides of the Atlantic, and from 1810 the American ones moved towards independence. Ferdinand VII returned in 1814 and sent about 10,000 troops to Mexico and 20,000 to South America over fifteen years. Two-thirds of them died of disease or in battle, and roughly 80 percent of the royalist army in Peru was recruited locally.
Rafael del Riego’s uprising in Spain in 1820 stopped further reinforcements. Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín led the final campaigns in South America, and Mexico declared independence in September 1821. Spain had already handed Florida to the United States in the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819. On 9 December 1824 Antonio José de Sucre’s army won at Ayacucho in the Peruvian Andes. The last royalist forts surrendered in 1826, and about twenty new states took the place of the mainland empire.
Cuba, Manila Bay and the Final Exit from Africa, 1898–1976
Cuba’s second independence war (1895–1898) killed about 300,000 people, including some 200,000 civilians who died of disease and hunger in Spanish concentration camps. The United States declared war on 25 April 1898 and destroyed Spain’s fleets at Manila Bay and Santiago de Cuba. Under the Treaty of Paris (1898), Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam passed to the United States, and the Philippines were sold to it for US$20 million. In 1899 Spain sold its remaining Pacific islands to Germany.
All that was left was in Africa. Spain took a protectorate in northern Morocco in 1912 and suffered a heavy defeat at Annual in 1921. Equatorial Guinea became independent at noon on 12 October 1968. Spain left Spanish Sahara in 1976, and Morocco and the Sahrawi independence movement still dispute the territory. Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands remain part of Spain. For a contrast in how a later maritime empire grew and broke up, see our British Empire geography guide.