Antonio Pérez Henares achieves, with evocative prose and a deep understanding of the time and the land, its smells, colors and flavors, an excellent tableau of those agitated years between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which, on an island in the Caribbean Sea, an empire began to take shape. When Admiral Columbus returned to the island of Hispaniola in 1493, at the head of seventeen ships, he found Fort Navidad, which just a few months before he had left well garrisoned, burned, surrounded by floating corpses and no survivors. A gateway to hell had been opened in paradise. After this terrible start, the story of those who today are world history begins: Columbus, the pilot Juan de la Cosa and his great friend the brave Captain Ojeda, the Niños and the Pinzones, Ponce de León, Bartolomé de las Casas, Ovando, Núñez de Balboa and Vespucio, and also of the chiefs Guacanagarí and Caonabo and of the beautiful and tragic Anacaona. Of Cortes, Pizarro and Alvarado, still waiting to leave and undertake the greatest conquests, and also of the cabin boys Trifoncillo and Alonso, of the loquacious tavern keeper Escabeche and his wife the Indian Triana, and even of the dogs Becerrillo and Leoncico. All of them at the same time and place. All of them at the same landing, sword in hand in battle or drinking wine from the same jug. Hispaniola was the beginning of everything in America. The first port of arrival and departure to glory and gold; the first city, the first cobblestone street where the ladies and the vicereine walked, and the first cathedral; the first battle, the first horses and the first dog soldiers; the first heroes, the first rebels and the first fratricidal confrontations, all so Spanish; the first criminals and the first defenders of the Indians, and the first mestizos who would mark the future and the hallmark of Hispanic America.