author
active 16th century Pedro de Aguado
A Franciscan missionary in the Spanish colonies, he left one of the most important early accounts of conquest and settlement in what are now Colombia and Venezuela. His writing blends eyewitness detail, religious purpose, and the rough texture of frontier history.
2 Audiobooks
Historia de Venezuela, Tomo II
by active 16th century Pedro de Aguado
Historia de Venezuela, Tomo I
by active 16th century Pedro de Aguado
About the author
Born in Valdemoro, Spain, in the 16th century, Pedro de Aguado became a Franciscan friar and traveled to the New Kingdom of Granada as part of a missionary group in the early 1560s. He spent many years working among Indigenous communities and later held important responsibilities within his order, including service in Santa Fe de Bogotá.
He is best remembered as a chronicler of early Spanish America. His major work, Recopilación historial, gathers accounts of conquest, settlement, and everyday colonial life across regions including New Granada and Venezuela. Because Aguado wrote close to the events he described, historians have long valued his work as a rich source for the early colonial period.
Some details of his life remain uncertain, including the exact dates of his birth and death. Even so, his reputation rests firmly on the scale of his historical writing and on the rare window it gives into the first decades of Spanish rule in northern South America.