Answer:
The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had transformed the world in climactic ways. One of the biggest transformations was finding and conquesting the Americas. With this comes a few theories, as in what had led both the Spanish and Portuguese empires to seek these voyages, but the truth of the matter is that the main reasons that pushed Spain to support Cristopher Columbus in his trip in 1492 were, first, the desire to discover and open new trade routes to the Indies. When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, their first encounter wasn't with big Native tribes or settled civilizations. It wasn't until later, in 1519, that the Spanish encountered true Native American civilization. And the first to find this was Hernán Cortés, who between 1519 and 1521, led a war against the Aztec Empire, one of the biggest and most important of the entire continent.
The Aztecs were settled in the Gulf of Mexico, in what is today Mexico itself. The second empire was the Inca Empire, in what is today Peru, specifically in Cusco. Unlike its sister empire in Mexico, the Incas did not have wheeled vehicles and they did not use farm animals. In the end, most of the Americas, save what is nowadays Brazil, which ended in the hands of Portugal, became part of the enormous Spanish Empire. The result was a group of colonies from which the Spanish derived the precious metal of gold and which made them really rich. The Natives, at first were enslaved by the Spanish until through intervention of the Church, black people were brought in to prevent the death of the Natives.
