1492Primary sourceWell documented
Columbus Reaches the Americas
On the timeline · around 1492 ·
What happened
Sailing west from Spain in 1492 in search of a route to Asia, Christopher Columbus instead reached islands of the Caribbean, where he encountered the Taíno people. The account he sent home was printed in 1493 and circulated widely, and his voyages opened a sustained, and for Native peoples catastrophic, era of European contact and colonization of the Americas.
Why it matters
Columbus's landfall linked the hemispheres permanently and marks a conventional threshold between the medieval and modern worlds — the Renaissance drive to explore, backed by new ships, maps, and ambition.
Sources
Related timelines
- The Age of Exploration → — The voyages that remade the world