La Española

When Admiral Columbus returned to the island of Hispaniola in 1493, at the head of seventeen ships, he found Fort Navidad, which just a few months before had left well garrisoned, burned, surrounded by floating corpses and no survivors. In paradise a door to hell had been opened. After this terrible start, the story of those who are world history today begins: the Columbus, the pilot Juan de la Cosa and his great friend the brave captain Ojeda, the Children and the Pinzones, Ponce de León, Bartolomé de las Casas, Ovando , Núñez de Balboa and Vespucio, and also of the caciques Guacanagarí and Caonabo and of the beautiful and tragic Anacaona. Of Cortés, of Pizarro and Alvarado, still waiting to leave and undertake the greatest conquests, and also of the cabin boys Trifoncillo and Alonso, the loquacious innkeeper Escabeche and his wife, the Indian Triana, and even the dogs Becerrillo and Leoncico . All of them at the same moment and place. All of them in the same landing, sword in hand in battle or drinking wine from the same jug. Antonio Pérez Henares achieves, with an evocative prose and a deep understanding of the time and the land, its smells, colors and flavors, an excellent altarpiece of those hectic years between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which, on an island of the Caribbean Sea, an empire began to take shape. Hispaniola was the beginning of everything in America. The first port of arrival and departure, crossing with death, towards glory and gold; the first city, the first cobbled street where the ladies and the first viceroy and the first cathedral walked; the first battle, the first horses and the dog soldiers; the first heroes, the first rebels and the first fratricidal confrontations, so Spanish, the first criminals, the first defenders, with Queen Isabel at the head, of the Indians and the first mestizos that would mark the future and the hallmark of the Hispanic America.