Ayolas, Juan de (1539?–?)

Juan de Ayolas (b. 1539; d.?), Spanish explorer active in Argentina and Paraguay. Ayolas was born a Hidalgo in the Briviesca region of Spain. Thanks to his long-time friendship with Pedro de Mendoza, he received a commission as mayordomo when the latter organized an expedition to explore the basin of the Río de la Plata in the early 1530s.

The voyage from Spain was not without its problems. Ayolas discovered a plot against Mendoza by dissident Spaniards while the small fleet was off the Brazilian coast. His quick action saved the adelantado and placed Ayolas in a good position to play a major role in the exploration of the Plata.

After the founding of Buenos Aires in 1536, Mendoza chose his friend to lead a new expedition inland to find a viable route to the silver districts of Upper Peru (what he optimistically termed the Sierra de la Plata). Ayolas ascended the Río Paraná with three vessels and two hundred men. He received succor along the way from various groups of Guaraní Indians, especially in the vicinity of what would one day become the city of Asunción. Proceeding upriver from that point, he finally halted in February 1537 at a spot some 120 miles to the north. There he divided his men, leaving behind forty under the command of Domingo Martínez de Irala and setting out on foot with the remaining 160 to cross the inhospitable Chaco region to Peru.

What occurred next is not entirely clear and is based exclusively on the testimony of a converted Chané Indian boy named Gonzalo. According to this eyewitness, after many tribulations, Ayolas and his party actually reached the Andes. He left a number of Europeans at an improvised camp in the hill country and, ferrying a quantity of silver taken from the resident Incas, recrossed the Chaco to the Río Paraguay, where the exhausted Ayolas expected to find Martínez de Irala and the three vessels awaiting his return. Irala, however, had gone south after a year in order to find provisions and to repair his ships. While Ayolas pondered his next move, a large band of Payaguás invited the weary Spaniards to take refuge with them, and then, at a prearranged signal, fell upon them and killed them to a man. Only the boy Gonzalo escaped to report what he had seen to Irala. The latter campaigned hard against these same Payaguáes over the next few years, but he never recovered the bodies of his comrades.

See alsoExplorers and Exploration: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harris Gaylord Warren, Paraguay: An Informal History (1949), pp. 34-50.

Carlos Zubizarreta, Cien vidas paraguayas, 2d ed. (1985), pp. 21-23.

Additional Bibliography

Miranda Silva, Fidel. Asunción fue fundada el 15 de agosto de 1536 por Juan de Ayolas: Trabajo de investigación bibliográfica. Ciudad del Este, Paraguay: F. Miranda Silva, 2005.

                                   Thomas L. Whigham