Spanish Exploration Quotes

Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn't figure in European history until 1493.

My maternal great-grandfather Don Juan del Gallego was a Spanish adventurer from Asturias, Spain. He sailed on a galleon ship to the Philippines. He then went to the Bicol region to build a town that eventually became known as Del Gallego.

Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement, established in 1607. The first permanent settlement was St. Augustine, established in 1565, by -- you know it – Spain.

It's crazy: the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards. That's something for me - as a black American, it gives me a little bit of pride because we were free and respected somewhere else before slavery became what it was.

At the lodge the chief gave me many particulars which were relative to the late visit of the Spaniards.

I was recently told, 'You're a liar!' when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.

All of Europe’s potatoes descended from few tubers sent across the ocean by curious Spaniards… the potato was as important to the modern era as the invention of the steam engine.

The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold.