A failed Spanish expedition to Florida left four survivors, and one of them, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, walked and traded his way across the continent over roughly eight years before meeting Spaniards again in Mexico. He wrote his account from memory.
The route runs from Spain through Cuba, Florida and the Texas coast to Culiacán and Mexico City. Most stops are approximate, and the middle of the journey is not traced because historians cannot fix his route.
A search for the Land of Cinnamon turned into the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea. Francisco de Orellana, with the friar Gaspar de Carvajal as chronicler, followed unmapped rivers, fought off warriors on the banks and gave the river the name it still carries.
The route runs from Quito to the Napo, the Rio Negro, the Amazon's mouth and the pearl island of Cubagua. River stops are approximate, and dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar still in use then.
The golden king who rafted out into a mountain lake in a coat of gold dust is a legend, first written down generations after the conquest. The gold, the Spanish expeditions, the draining of the lake and a small golden raft in a museum are history.
The route follows both threads, and each stop says which is which: Quesada's march in 1537, the lake itself, the drainage, a rival lake, the cave where a raft turned up in 1969 and the Bogotá museum that keeps it.
In November 1532 Francisco Pizarro reached Cajamarca with 110 foot soldiers and 67 cavalry. Within a day he had captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa, and a year later the Spanish entered Cusco, the Inca capital.
The route follows Pizarro from his first landfall at Tumbes in 1528 through the first Spanish town in Peru and the Ransom Room in Cajamarca to the Sun Temple in Cusco and, finally, Lima, the city he founded and where he was killed. The conquest is told from the places where it happened; the first two pins are only approximate.
In April 1519 Cortés landed on the coast of Veracruz; in August 1521 the Aztec capital fell. In between came alliances, a massacre, a night of disaster on a causeway and an eight-month siege.
The route follows the campaign from Villa Rica to Tlatelolco and sets the Spanish accounts of Cortés and Díaz beside Tlaxcalan and Aztec ones where they are known. Where the accounts conflict, the stop says so.
