One of the things that we seem to know a lot about but strangely, at the same time, not much at all is the Spanish colonization of South America and the Caribbean. Some sources have led us to believe that huge armies of conquistadors traveled from nation to nation, killing, plundering and burning down everything they came across on their conquest… but this couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Mostly explorers (or at least at the beginning they were), the Spanish conquerors of Latin America were able to use brains more than brawn to achieve their objectives: through manipulation of political alliances and rivalries between the natives, psychological trickery and superior military tactics, a few hundred Spaniards were able to take down empires and achieve one of the biggest conquests in the history of humankind. But what happened when these European conquerors started getting too power-hungry and the fighting began between them?

Find out more in the latest episode of the Learn Spanish with Stories podcast by Lingo Mastery!

Transcript of this episode is available at: https://podcast.lingomastery.com/listen/973