Nueva Galicia

Nueva Galicia, the New Kingdom of Galicia, was an autonomous kingdom of the Viceroyalty of New Spain covering what are now the Mexican states of Aguascalientes, Colima, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Nayarit and Zacatecas. Spanish exploration of the north-west began in 1531 with Nuño de Guzmán's expedition, and he named the town he founded Villa de Guadalajara after his own birthplace in Galicia. His conquest was violent and unstable, and the Mixtón War of 1540 to 1541 pitted an alliance of Coras, Guachichils and Caxcans against the settlers, while a second, longer Chichimeca War followed nine years later. As silver was discovered to the north, Guadalajara became the seat of the second mainland audiencia of New Spain in 1548, made independent of Mexico in 1572, and the north was ruled largely apart from the rest of the viceroyalty. Nahuas from the Valley of Mexico moved in with the Spanish, and Huichols arrived in the late sixteenth century. In 1621 Domingo Lázaro de Arregui published his Descripción de la Nueva Galicia, one of the earliest accounts of the region's peoples. The Bourbon reforms created an intendancy at Guadalajara in the late eighteenth century, and after Mexican independence was consolidated the kingdom was broken up into the State of Jalisco and the Territory of Colima in 1824.