The first known Europeans to contact the Americas are believed to have been the Vikings ("Norse"), who established several colonies in the Americas from the 11th century. One Viking from Norway, Leif Erikson established a short-lived settlement in Vinland, present day Newfoundland. Settlements in Greenland survived for several centuries, during which time the Greenland Norse and the Inuit people experienced mostly hostile contact. By the 15th century the Norse Greenland settlements had collapsed.
Several medieval Arabic sources also suggest that Muslim explorers from the Al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia, comprising modern Spain and Portugal) may have travelled in expeditions across the Atlantic to the Americas between the 9th and 14th centuries.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, after which European exploration and colonization rapidly expanding through Hispaniola, Puerto Rico (Borinquen) and Cuba. The post-1492 era is known as the Columbian Exchange period.
The European lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and various domesticated fowl, which had resulted in epidemic diseases unknown in the Americas. Thus the large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas. Smallpox (1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) epidemics swept ahead of initial European contact killing between 10 million and 112 million people, about 95% to 98% of the indigenous population. This population loss and the cultural chaos and political collapses it caused greatly facilitated both colonization of the land and the conquest of the native civilizations.
The first conquests were made by the Spanish, who quickly conquered most of South and Central America and large parts of North America. The Portuguese took Brazil. The British, French and Dutch conquered islands in the Caribbean Sea, many of which had already been conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease. Early European colonies in North America included Spanish Florida, the British settlements in Virginia and New England, French settlements in Quebec and Louisiana, and Dutch settlements in New Netherlands.
Denmark-Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland from the 18th until the 20th century, and also colonised a few of the Virgin Islands.