What was the first successful colony in the New World?
The Spanish founded the first successful colony in North America at Saint Augustine in 1565. Over the next century, Spanish colonists and conquistadors seized and settled everything in the Americas from Mexico to the modern-day U.S. West and southward, with the exception of British Honduras, the Guyanas, and Brazil. In addition, the Spanish controlled Florida and much of the Caribbean. Although the Spanish were eventually evicted from the New World by national independence movements and other European powers, they intermarried with the population of their territories to such a degree that almost all Hispanic Americans can trace at least part of their lineage back to Spain. Since 1820, immigration to the United States from Spain has been extremely small, averaging fewer than 2,000 people per year.
