South America was explored over centuries by dozens of expeditions, from the first European coastal landings in the late 1490s to scientific journeys that continued well into the twentieth century. The continent’s exploration wasn’t a single story but a series of overlapping ones: navigators mapping the coastline, conquistadors toppling empires, naturalists cataloging thousands of new species, and adventurers pushing into the interior in search of lost cities. Before any of them arrived, indigenous peoples had built civilizations across the continent for thousands of years, and there is genetic evidence that Polynesian voyagers made contact with South Americans around 1200 AD.
Early Coastal Voyages
Christopher Columbus touched the coast of present-day Venezuela during his third voyage in 1498, but he believed he had reached Asia. It was the Italian merchant and navigator Amerigo Vespucci who helped reshape that understanding. Sailing under both Spanish and Portuguese flags between 1497 and 1504, Vespucci explored the coast of what is now Guyana, likely discovered the mouth of the Amazon River, and reached as far south as Cape St. Augustine in Brazil (about 6° south latitude) during his 1499–1500 voyage.
His second expedition, which departed Lisbon in May 1501, may have taken him along the coast of Patagonia in southern Argentina before returning in July 1502. That voyage proved pivotal: Vespucci and the scholars who studied his accounts became convinced these lands were not part of Asia but an entirely separate continent. The German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named the landmass “America” after Vespucci in 1507.
Portugal Claims Brazil
In April 1500, the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral, sailing a route meant to take him around Africa to India, veered far enough west to sight the hump of Monte Pascoal on the Brazilian coast. His fleet sailed north for three days to find a suitable landing near present-day Porto Seguro. On April 22, Cabral formally claimed the territory for Portugal, erected a cross, and held a Christian service. The local indigenous people, living as hunter-gatherers and fishers, came out to observe the newcomers. When Cabral’s fleet continued toward India, he left behind two exiled criminals, who fathered the first mixed-heritage children in Brazil, beginning a demographic shift that would eventually dwarf the indigenous population.
Magellan and the Southern Strait
Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain sailing for Spain, navigated the narrow waterway at South America’s southern tip between October 21 and November 28, 1520. The passage, now called the Strait of Magellan, took over five weeks to cross. His expedition then entered the Pacific Ocean and continued westward, eventually completing the first circumnavigation of the globe (though Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines). The discovery of the strait proved that South America was bounded by ocean on its southern end and that a sea route to Asia existed without rounding Africa.
Pizarro and the Inca Empire
The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro launched the most consequential military expedition into the continent’s interior. After two preliminary voyages along South America’s Pacific coast in the 1520s, he arrived at the Inca city of Cajamarca in November 1532 with roughly 170 soldiers. There, Pizarro’s men ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa, killing the chiefs and litter-bearers surrounding him and capturing him alive. The Inca forces, despite vastly outnumbering the Spanish, offered almost no resistance after nightfall.
Atahualpa attempted to ransom himself with enormous quantities of gold. Spanish soldiers sent to the Inca capital of Cusco returned with 1.5 million pesos’ worth of the metal. Pizarro ultimately had Atahualpa executed on charges of plotting an uprising and installed the emperor’s brother as a puppet ruler. The fall of the Inca Empire opened the Andes to Spanish colonization and reshaped the political landscape of the entire continent.
First Descent of the Amazon
In April 1541, Francisco de Orellana, a Spanish soldier serving under one of Pizarro’s lieutenants, set out on a side mission to find provisions. He took a small boat and 50 soldiers down the Napo River to its junction with the Marañón, a major Amazon tributary. His men convinced him that returning upstream was impossible, so Orellana committed to floating the entire length of the river system. Drifting with the current for over a year, he reached the Amazon’s mouth at the Atlantic Ocean in August 1542.
Along the way, Orellana reported encounters with tribes led by female warriors, whom he compared to the Amazons of Greek mythology. That comparison gave the river its lasting name. He also told stories of gold and cinnamon groves, which fueled later expeditions into the interior. Orellana was the first European to travel the full length of the Amazon, establishing that the river crossed nearly the entire width of the continent.
Humboldt’s Scientific Expedition
While earlier explorers sought territory and treasure, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt came for knowledge. Between 1799 and 1804, he spent five years traveling through Latin America, charting river courses, measuring mountains, recording indigenous languages, and collecting economic data. His route took him through present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, among other regions.
In the Andes, Humboldt walked along roads originally built by the Inca and climbed nearly to the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, reaching an altitude above 19,000 feet. His painstaking records of which plants grew at which elevations on that peak essentially invented the field of plant ecology. He also made a geological argument that would prove prophetic: the rock layers in the Peruvian mountains, he wrote, dated from the same periods as their counterparts in the Swiss Alps. The old and new worlds, he concluded, were the same geological age. Humboldt’s work transformed South America from a place of myth and conquest into a subject of serious scientific study.
Bingham and Machu Picchu
On July 24, 1911, Yale University lecturer Hiram Bingham III climbed a mountain ridge above the Urubamba River in Peru and encountered the ruins of Machu Picchu. The site was not truly “lost” in any absolute sense: local farmers knew it was there. But Bingham was the first outsider to document it systematically. He had prepared by studying Spanish colonial chronicles, consulting maps by Peruvian geographers, and working with tips from Harvard archaeologist Curtis Farabee, who had told him there were lost cities above the Urubamba valley.
Bingham’s method was simple but effective. He traveled from point to point using place names from historical records and never turned down an offer from locals to go look at ruins. He also gathered oral testimony from people living in the region. His discovery brought global attention to Inca architecture and engineering, and Machu Picchu eventually became South America’s most visited archaeological site.
Fawcett and the Lost City of Z
British explorer Percy Fawcett represents the darker side of South American exploration. A surveyor who had mapped remote borders for the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett became obsessed with finding what he called the “Lost City of Z” after reading a 1753 Portuguese manuscript in Rio de Janeiro’s National Library. The document described a walled city deep in the Mato Grosso region of the Amazon rainforest, supposedly resembling ancient Greece.
In 1925, Fawcett set out with his son Jack and a family friend into the Brazilian interior. His last known communication placed the team crossing the Upper Xingu, a southeastern tributary of the Amazon. They reached a place Fawcett called Dead Horse Camp and sent dispatches for five months before going silent. No confirmed trace of them was ever found. In 2007, archaeologist Michael Heckenberger discovered a monumental ancient site called Kuhikugu near the area where Fawcett had been searching, suggesting the explorer’s instinct about a complex civilization in the region was not entirely wrong, even if his romantic vision of a stone city was.
Before the Europeans Arrived
South America was not an empty continent waiting to be “discovered.” Indigenous peoples had been living there for at least 15,000 years, building everything from the Inca road system spanning thousands of miles to the earthworks and garden cities of the Amazon basin. A 2020 genetic study published in Nature found conclusive evidence that Polynesian voyagers made contact with Native South Americans around 1200 AD, centuries before any European set foot on the continent. The analysis of 807 individuals from 17 Pacific island populations identified a single contact event in eastern Polynesia involving a group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia. The sweet potato, a South American crop that Polynesians were already growing when Europeans arrived in the Pacific, is likely one tangible result of that exchange.