The first European explorers in what is now Virginia were Spaniards, who landed at two separate places several decades before the English founded Jamestown. By 1525 the Spanish had charted the eastern Atlantic coastline north of Florida. In 1609, Francisco Fernández de Écija, seeking to deny the English claim, asserted that Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's failed colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, which lasted the three months of winter 1526–27, had been near Jamestown. Modern scholars instead place this first Spanish colony within the US in Georgia.