The Spanish were not the first Europeans to reach North America. About 1,000 years ago, five centuries before Columbus sailed to the Caribbean in 1492, the Vikings built simple fishing camps in Newfoundland and Labrador.1
European colonization of the North American continent began soon after Columbus's discoveries. The Spanish started permanent colonies in the Caribbean, and Santo Domingo (founded 1496) remains the oldest continuously-occupied colonial settlement in the New World.
The Spanish were not alone in trying to explore and settle the New World. There was competition from other European states, but initially they avoided the Caribbean because of the Spanish presence there.
During the 1500's, English and French explorers looking for fishing grounds determined the outlines of the North American coast north of New England. The sailors constructed temporary camps on Newfoundland when fishing off the coast. Those camps remained as isolated, single-purpose communities, occupied only during the time when cod were being caught and dried for transport back to Europe.
In 1541-3, the French tried to establish a permanent settlement on the St. Lawrence River. That failed, but the French returned in 1603 to start again at St. Croix Island and Nova Scotia. In the six decades between those efforts, the French sought twice to build colonies on the southeastern coast of North America.
The settlement at Charlesfort (1562) collapsed before the Spanish had an opportunity to attack it. The Spanish destroyed the later French colony at Fort Caroline (1565), and then Spanish soldiers executed Jean Ribault and nearly all of of his shipwrecked colonists in a massacre on a Florida beach.
After that experience, France avoided conflict with Spain by settling much further north of St. Augustine. By choosing St. Croix and then Quebec, the French left an unoccupied zone on the eastern edge of the continent.
The English, Dutch, and Swedes focused their North American colonization efforts in that gap between the French and Spanish, but only after the military power of Spain was diminished by the failure of its sleet (the Spanish Armada) to conquer England in 1588.
IamSugarBee
