Miguel Cabello de Balboa

show This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (December 2009) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Russian article. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Бальбоа, Кабельо]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|ru|Бальбоа, Кабельо}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Miguel Cabello de Balboa (1535 in Archidona, Málaga – 1608 in Camata) was a Spanish secular priest and writer. In 1566 he emigrated to Peru in South America; from here he went to Quito, Ecuador, where he began to write the Miscelánea Antárctica, finishing it at Lima in 1586. In the years 1602-1603, he wrote a letter giving valuable details concerning the regions of Pelechuco and Apolobamba in eastern Bolivia, between the Andes and the Beni River. In this letter he does not explicitly state that he visited those districts, but the information imparted is such as to imply this. The letter is taken from a book written by Father Cabello of which nothing else is known. He is also an important source on the northern Andean region, especially the Pacific shore and the forested regions running inland up to the cordilleras of what are now northern Ecuador and southern Colombia.

An exemplary edition of the whole Miscellanea Antarctica was published by San Marcos University (Peru) in 1951, supplanting previous partial editions. The original was (1853) in possession of the historiographer at Mexico. A complete copy also exists at the Lenox Branch of the New York Public Library. It contains alleged Amerindian traditional records of the coming to South America of white men who are said to have preached the gospels to the aborigines; also a theory that the Indians of Patagonia and Chile are the descendants of pirates of Macassar. The legendary history of the Inca civilization is expounded at length, and the origin of the Inca given in a manner somewhat at variance with the accounts of other Spanish authors. Writings about the lowland peoples are gathered in a 1945 Ecuadorian volume entitled Verdadera descripción y relación larga de la provincia y tierra de las Esmeraldas.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Missing or empty |title= (help)