The voyages of Christopher Columbus led to the first lasting European contact with the Americas, inaugurating a period of European exploration, conquest, and colonization that lasted for several centuries. Columbus was not the first European explorer to reach the Americas having been preceded by the Norse expedition led by Leif Erikson in the 11th century. Leif Erikson was an Icelandic explorer considered by some as the first European to land in North America (excluding Greenland), before Columbus. There is much debate as some say that many different people, spanning centuries, set foot on the New World (as the Americas were called) before Columbus, and, of course, the ancestors of the Native Americans had already discovered it many years before.
