Diego Gutiérrez y Toledo (c. 1510 – December 1544) was the first governor of

Nuevo Cartago y Costa Rica Province Nuevo Cartago y Costa Rica was a province of the Kingdom of Guatemala, created in 1540 during the reign of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (King Charles I of Spain). It was formed from two earlier Spanish territories. The first of these was Royal Ve ...

, established by the

Crown of Castile The Crown of Castile was a medieval polity in the Iberian Peninsula that formed in 1230 as a result of the third and definitive union of the crowns and, some decades later, the parliaments of the kingdoms of Kingdom of Castile, Castile and Kingd ...

within the

Captaincy General of Guatemala The Captaincy General of Guatemala (), also known as the Kingdom of Guatemala (), was an administrative division of the Spanish Empire, under the viceroyalty of New Spain in Central America, including present-day Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras ...

in the

Viceroyalty of New Spain New Spain, officially the Viceroyalty of New Spain ( ; Nahuatl: ''Yankwik Kaxtillan Birreiyotl''), originally the Kingdom of New Spain, was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain. It was one of several ...

. Under a new decree on November 29, 1540, the King appointed Diego Gutierrez as governor and captain to explore and populate the portion of Veragua that lay outside the Duchy. By this time, the entity known as Veragua Real had officially ceased to exist as an administrative division due to the creation of the Duchy of Veragua. As a result, the vast Veragua was divided into two parts: the Duchy of Veragua and another region that was unified with territories on the Pacific slope previously belonging to Castilla de Oro. This territory was renamed the Gobernación de Cartago by the King. However, the first governor, Diego Gutierrez, insisted on naming it Gobernación de Cartago y Costa Rica. He did not begin acting as such until late 1543 due to a series of difficulties. On 22 November 1543 he founded the village of Santiago in

Costa Rica Costa Rica, officially the Republic of Costa Rica, is a country in Central America. It borders Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, Panama to the southeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, as well as Maritime bo ...

and on 4 October 1544 he founded the village of San Francisco, abandoning Santiago. In San Francisco he hosted several local chiefs, who he later held for ransom. One of the chiefs escaped and another one admitted not having valuables to offer. Consequently, Gutiérrez y Toledo subjected him to servitude, which prompted other indigenous groups to destroy the Spanish colony in retaliation. Gutiérrez y Toledo and the rest of the colonists then marched into the jungle, where they were killed by the natives. Gutiérrez y Toledo was born in the village of

Madrid Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...

, in 1510, to

Alonso Gutiérrez de Madrid Alonso is a Spanish name of Germanic origin that is a Castilian variant of ''Adalfuns''. The original Visigothic name ''Alfonso'' suffered the phonetic change of the phoneme /f/ into the mute /h/ in the Early Middle Ages (around 9th Century), w ...

, royal treasurer, and María Rodríguez de Pisa, both '' judeoconversos''. His brother

Felipe Gutiérrez y Toledo Felipe is the Spanish variant of the name Philip, which derives from the Greek adjective ''Philippos'' "friend of horses". Felipe is also widely used in Portuguese-speaking Brazil alongside Filipe, the form commonly used in Portugal. Noteworthy ...

(1500 – 1544) became the governor of

Veragua The name Veragua or Veraguas was used for five Spanish colonial territorial entities in Central America, beginning in the 16th century during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The term comes from the name given to the region by Central Am ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gutiérrez y Toledo, Diego 1510s births 1544 deaths Politicians from Madrid Colonial officials for Spain