Stand on the empty stones of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, and you can almost hear the surf beyond the walls. The city was founded in 1496 by Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher Columbus, after the second voyage of 1493 brought settlers and goods to build a permanent Castilian town in the New World. What began here was no outpost of tents, but the template for a colonial empire that would stretch from the Caribbean to Asia.

Its makers were Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs, whose marriage joined the Crowns of Castile and Aragon under the House of Trastámara. In 1492 they completed the conquest of Granada, then backed Christopher Columbus, who sailed west that same year. The Capitulations of Santa Fe on 17 April 1492 made him viceroy and governor of lands discovered and still to be discovered, while the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the world with Portugal and gave Spain the Western Hemisphere.

From those beginnings the empire took shape in hard facts and hard violence. Juan Ponce de León conquered Puerto Rico in 1508, Diego Velázquez took Cuba, and Vasco Núñez de Balboa founded Santa María la Antigua del Darién in 1510 before crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 to sight the Pacific Ocean from the west. In Mexico, Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519 with 550 men, entered Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519, and after the siege of 1521 destroyed the Aztec capital. Francisco Pizarro followed in 1532 by capturing Atahualpa in Cajamarca, opening the road to the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542.

The empire then became a machine for extracting wealth and ruling at distance. Gold and silver from Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Potosí filled the crown’s coffers, while the House of Trade in Seville, founded in 1503, tried to control shipping to Veracruz, Havana, Cartagena de Indias, Callao and Manila. Genoese bankers financed expeditions and wars, and the Spanish Habsburgs under Charles V and Philip II spent American silver on campaigns in France, Germany, the Netherlands and against the Ottoman Empire. Even the first circumnavigation, led by Magellan and completed by Elcano, widened Spain’s Pacific reach.

By the late 1700s the Spanish Empire had reached its greatest extent, covering about 13.7 million square kilometres and becoming the empire on which the sun never sets. Philip V’s Bourbon reforms centralised power through the Nueva Planta decrees, shifted imperial administration to Cádiz in 1717 and 1718, and opened freer trade in 1778. Yet those reforms also sharpened tensions between peninsular Spaniards and Creoles in the Americas. When Napoleon seized Spain in 1808, the old order cracked, and by the mid-1820s Spain had lost Mexico, Central America and South America.