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Guanahaní (meaning "small upper waters land") was the Taíno name of an island in the Bahamas that was the first land in the New World sighted and visited by Christopher Columbus' first voyage, on 12 October 1492. It is a bean-shaped island that Columbus called San Salvador. Guanahaní has traditionally been identified with Watlings Island, which was officially renamed San Salvador Island in 1925 as a result, but modern scholars are divided on the accuracy of this identification and several alternative candidates in and around the southern Bahamas have been proposed as well. Upon his return to Spain in the spring of 1493, Columbus wrote a letter to Luis de Santangel, one of his patrons at the Royal Court of Castile. The letter was printed widely and translated into many languages, spreading the news of the discovery throughout Europe. In the letter, Columbus mentions Guanahani as the name of the first island he discovered, but provides no other details. Nevertheless, this single mention in a widely printed letter would have been enough to make the name Guanahani widely known at an early date. Map of Juan de la Cosa Juan de la Cosa was the owner and master of the Santa María and as such sailed with Columbus on the first voyage. He was also a cartographer, and in 1500 de la Cosa drew a map of the world which is widely known as the earliest European map showing the New World. The Caribbean portion of the map shows Cuba and Hispaniola clearly, and a much more confused rendering of the Bahamas. Nevertheless, Guanahani is drawn in the Bahamas in a form that appears to show a group of islets rather than a single island, lying due north of the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, in the central part of the Bahamas islands chain. Christopher Columbus's journal Columbus' so-called log, more properly referred to as the Diario, is an abstract made by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and friend of the Columbus family, probably sometime in the 1540s.

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Related concepts (5)

New World

The term New World is often used to describe the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, including the Americas. The term gained prominence in the early 16th century during Europe's Age of Discovery, shortly after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci concluded that America, now often called the Americas, represented a new continent and subsequently published his findings in Mundus Novus, a Latin language pamphlet.

Cuba

Cuba (ˈkjuːbə , ˈkuβa; Erekusú), officially the Republic of Cuba (República de Cuba reˈpuβlika ðe ˈkuβa), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet. Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), south of both the American state of Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), and north of both Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

Catholic Monarchs of Spain

The Catholic Monarchs were Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain. They were both from the House of Trastámara and were second cousins, being both descended from John I of Castile; to remove the obstacle that this consanguinity would otherwise have posed to their marriage under canon law, they were given a papal dispensation by Sixtus IV. They married on October 19, 1469, in the city of Valladolid; Isabella was 18 years old and Ferdinand a year younger.