Decolonization of the Americas was during the official Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. In 1898, in the Greater Antilles, the United States won the Spanish–American War and occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico, ending Spanish territorial control in the Americas. Unlike the Spanish, the Portuguese did not divide their colonial territory in the Americas. The captaincies they created were subdued to a centralized administration in Salvador which reported directly to the Crown in Lisbon. Therefore, it is not common to refer to "Portuguese America" (like Spanish America, Dutch America, etc.), but rather to Brazil, as a unified colony since its very beginnings. As a
Portuguese colonization of the Americas instance, for the Portuguese town of Póvoa de Varzim, most of its seafarers dying abroad, most of the deaths occurred in the Route of the Antilles, in the West Indies. At the turn of the 17th century, with the union with Castile, the Spanish kings favored the free movement of the people, and other lands of the New World, such as Peru and the Gulf of Mexico, were open to the Portuguese merchants. The Portuguese founded the first Uruguayan city, Colónia do Sacramento. Portuguese colonization of the Americas Portugal was the leading country in the European exploration of the world