Did You Know? Every Answer Is Spain
Did You Know?
Every single answer is Spain
A quick-fire quiz that quietly dismantles the myth that Spain was a minor player in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
One flag. Countless chains.
First European nation to import enslaved Africans directly to the Americas?
Spain – 1501, Hispaniola (modern Dominican Republic/Haiti). The very first documented cargo arrived on the caravel Santa María under orders from the Spanish Crown.
Who created the asiento de negros – the royal monopoly that turned human beings into a state-licensed commodity?
Spain – 1518. For centuries the Spanish Crown auctioned the exclusive right to supply slaves to its colonies (and often to other nations’ colonies too).
Which European power dominated the slave trade in the 1500s and early 1600s?
Spain – Between 1500 and 1640 roughly 450,000 Africans were carried under the Spanish flag or asiento contracts – more than any other nation in that period.
Which coast of Africa did Spanish ships raid most heavily in the 1500s?
Upper Guinea – Senegambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and the Cape Verde islands (then a Portuguese colony but heavily used by Spanish traders). Later they shifted to the Angola/Congo region (Loango, Luanda, Benguela) once Portugal became part of the Spanish Crown (1580–1640).
Name some infamous Spanish slave ships whose logs still survive
- Nuestra Señora de la Concepción (1568) – carried 400 captives from Cape Verde to Cartagena
- San Juan Bautista (1615) – left Angola with 370, arrived Veracruz with 147 dead
- Nuestra Señora del Rosario (1640s) – multiple voyages documented in Seville’s Archivo General de Indias
- La Amistad (1839) – technically Cuban-Spanish registry when the revolt happened
Yes – thousands of original Spanish ship manifests, passenger lists, and notarial contracts survive in the
Archivo General de Indias in Seville and are being digitised.
Who kept slavery legal in its colonies the longest in the Americas?
Spain – Cuba (until 1886) and Puerto Rico (until 1873) abolished slavery after Brazil and decades after Britain, France, and the United States.
Which single colony received the most enslaved Africans under Spanish rule?
Cuba – Over 1 million Africans were forcibly brought to Cuba between 1511 and 1886 – more than to the entire United States.
So why do we never hear Spain when we talk about the slave trade?
Spain's relative silence in slave trade conversations reflects a complicated truth:the language of colonization became the language of the colonized. Millions of Afro-Latinos now speak the same tongue that once organized their ancestors' enslavement, while carrying surnames that trace back to those transactions. This living paradox doesn't diminish Spain's role—it asks us to confront the uncomfortable ways history continues to breathe in our present.
Oké Osimiri na-echeta aha ọ bụla ụgbọ mmiri bu.
The ocean remembers every name the ships carried.
When we speak of Spain's role in the slave trade, we refer to the Spanish Crown and its state machinery—the monarchy, government, and financiers who authorized and profited from the system. While geographically part of Europe, Spain's history is uniquely shaped by its 800-year period of Islamic Moorish rule from North Africa, making its culture a profound blend of European, African, and Middle Eastern influences.
This very hybridity creates a complex paradox: a nation often historically seen as Europe's 'other' due to its African connections became a primary architect of the transatlantic system that enslaved Africans, a history now echoed in the Spanish language and surnames carried by millions of Afro-Latinos today.
