Casa de Contratación

Recorded American bullion imports through Seville, 1503–1660

Sixteen million kilograms of silver was never one fabulous fleet. It is a total assembled from more than a century and a half of registrations.

Not something that happened in 1503

This is not a single shipment or occurrence. It is a retrospective total reconstructed from registrations of American bullion imported into Spain between 1503 and 1660: approximately 16,000,000 kilograms of silver and 185,000 kilograms of gold.

What did happen that year was administrative. On 20 January, at Alcalá de Henares, Ferdinand and Isabella issued a royal provision establishing the Casa de la Contratación in Seville and promulgating its first ordinances.

Where the paper was, and where the ships were

The Casa registered and supervised Indies commerce, and its surviving records became the archival basis for the whole series. Seville was the administrative destination and the place of registration.

Seville is inland. Another account identifies Sanlúcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir roughly 80 river kilometres away, as the port where the bullion arrived from the Atlantic.

How solid the numbers are

The economic historian Earl J. Hamilton reconstructed the import series from Casa records. The underlying registrations combined gold and silver by monetary value, and his division of the total into weights of each metal involved estimates that a later economic-history review calls partly speculative.

Official registrations also omit contraband and other unrecorded flows, so the figures are recorded-import estimates or lower bounds.

They are not the same thing as total American mine production, or as bullion retained by the Spanish Crown.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The gold and silver figures are rounded historical estimates, not direct measurements of all American production.
Hamilton's underlying registrations combined gold and silver by monetary value; his division of the total into weights of each metal involved estimates that a later economic-history review calls partly speculative.
Official registrations omit contraband and other unrecorded flows, so the figures should be treated as recorded-import estimates or lower bounds, not complete extraction totals.