Vicente Pinzón becomes the first European to reach Brazil
On this day · 26 January 1500
Months before Portugal's Cabral made landfall, a former captain of Columbus's Niña sighted the Brazilian coast and sailed straight into the Amazon's mouth.
On January 26, 1500, the Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón sighted land on the northeastern coast of present-day Brazil, near a cape he named Cabo Santa María de la Consolación in what is now Pernambuco. He had crossed the Atlantic with four caravels out of Palos, having earlier commanded the Niña during Columbus’s first voyage of 1492.
Pinzón pressed northward along the coast, where he became the first European to enter the vast estuary of the Amazon. Struck by how far its fresh water pushed out to sea, he called it the “Río Santa María de la Mar Dulce” — the river of the sweet-water sea.
His sighting came roughly three months before Portugal’s Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived in April and formally claimed the territory. Historians still debate exactly where Pinzón landed, but his priority on the Brazilian coast is widely accepted — even if the colonizing, and the credit, largely followed Cabral.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
