Francisco Vázquez de Coronado
Spanish explorer of the American southwest · Spain · Historical Figures · Lived 1510 to 1554 · aged 44
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Something wrong?He marched thousands of miles chasing cities of gold that didn't exist, but what he found instead - the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, the American Southwest mapped for the first time by European eyes - outlasted the myth.
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About this person
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado left Mexico in 1540 leading a large expedition north in search of the Cities of Cíbola, the fabled Seven Cities of Gold that Spanish rumor had placed somewhere in the unknown lands beyond the frontier. The treasure never materialized. What his party encountered instead, between 1540 and 1542, was geography: the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, and a sweep of the southwestern United States extending all the way to present-day Kansas, none of it previously recorded by Europeans. He returned empty-handed by the standards of conquistador ambition. He died in September 1554, twelve years after the expedition ended, his name eventually Anglicized and attached to the landscape he'd been the first of his world to see.
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