Africans accompanied, as slaves, the earliest voyages and expeditions to the New World. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, however, with a numerous if already declining native American population to exploit, the demand for African slave labour in Spanish America was modest, except to some extent in the Caribbean islands and the tropical coasts of the mainland, from which Indians virtually vanished in the early stages of colonization. For the period from 1521 to 1550 the most reliable estimate, that of Philip D. Curtin, puts the total number of blacks shipped to Spanish America at 15,000 (an annual average of 500), and for the years 1551–95, the figure rose only to 36,300 (an annual average of 810). It would be an overstatement to term the African slave a luxury item during this period – slaves can be found in gold panning and in plantation agriculture (mainly sugar) as well as in domestic service – but the distribution of blacks was relatively generalized, and no particular region was as yet dependent on slavery as a labour institution. However, as the Indian population in the main centres of the Spanish empire, Mexico and Peru, declined rapidly towards the end of the sixteenth century an increasing volume of petitions to the crown from colonists and government officials urged a supply of additional manpower, and the obvious source was Africa.

No firm or well-defined tradition of town planning was brought by the Portuguese settlers to Brazil. Unlike Italy, France and Spain, neither the regular gridiron nor the radial town plan had had any currency in Portugal. The suggestion has been made by Robert Smith that when Salvador da Bahia was built on two levels, the upper connected to the lower town by steep lanes, a traditional Portuguese layout – represented by Lisbon, Coimbra and Oporto, for example – was being followed. This suggestion remains conjectural. Certainly the fairly regular layout of upper Salvador, with four or five long, more or less parallel streets crossed at right angles by a dozen shorter ones, does have a few precedents in Portugal, especially in the north of the country, e.g. Bragança, Caminha, Viana do Castelo, Braga, Aveiro. Such orthogonal urban plans were part of the general western European cultural heritage derived from classical antiquity. Nevertheless they are not common in Portugal and comparatively rare in the early towns built by the Portuguese overseas. In Lusitanian India the fortress towns of Damaō and Bassein were constructed on regular orthogonal plans, and the layouts of Cochim and Sāo Tomé (Meliapor) were also basically orthogonal, though less regular.

The contrast between Portuguese colonial cities and those of Spanish America, particularly Mexico, has often been noticed. In Spanish America regular gridiron plans, confirmed from c. 1573 in the Leyes de Indias, are common. What has less often been observed is the contrast to be found in both empires between the capital city or administrative centre on the one hand and the mining town on the other.

This chapter is divided geographically into two broad regions: first Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean; then the rest of Spanish America, that is Spanish South America. Within each we shall look at architecture, sculpture, and painting. The emphasis will be on architecture, especially religious architecture, together with the quasi-architectural retables (a kind of ‘fantasy architecture’). In the fields of sculpture and painting we shall encounter some distinguished artists and even some series of significant works which, with some difficulty, might be deemed to constitute a ‘school’, such as the Quito school in sculpture and the Cuzco school in painting. But only in the field of architecture do we find any coherence and continuity. It is therefore to architecture that we must look for the key to an understanding of the culture of colonial Spanish America.

Ninety per cent of what is interesting in Spanish colonial architecture falls into the category of religious architecture. Important cities possessed a cathedral plus a smaller or greater number of parish churches in the hands of the secular clergy. Belonging to the regular clergy of the religious orders, besides the convents themselves were the churches and chapels that depended upon them, known as conventuales. ‘Religious’ architecture, however, consisted not only of cathedrals, churches, and chapels but also hospitals, colleges, universities, and other institutions which in colonial society were the responsibility of the church, as well as estate and mission buildings. And as the financial resources of the church grew, its wealth was expressed in the increasing size and splendour of its buildings.

If the years 1808–22, following the dramatic arrival of the Portuguese court at Rio de Janeiro, are considered for Brazil a period of transition from colony to independent empire, then the years 1750–1808 may be regarded as the last phase of Brazil's colonial experience. The era began as the mining boom was reaching its zenith; then, quite unexpectedly, the boom was over and an extended depression ensued. But Brazilians readjusted to the decline of the mineral sector by returning to agriculture, their traditional source of wealth. The result for coastal Brazil (but not the interior) was several decades of renewed prosperity based, in part, upon an expansion in the production of traditional staples, particularly sugar and tobacco, but also upon the development of new exports, especially cotton and rice, as well as cacao, coffee, and indigo. That recovery was accomplished without any fundamental improvements in technology or alterations in the patterns of land tenure, but through the growth of old and new markets and an intensified reliance upon slave labour. During this period Brazil accepted without protest the crown's decision to expel her most respected missionary order (the Jesuits) and to restrict the role of the remaining religious bodies. Portugal fought and lost two wars to secure Brazil's southern boundaries, but a third conflict (1801) gained Brazil rich agricultural and pastoral lands in the temperate south. Colonial Brazil had reached her territorial limits. Though she virtually ignored the first American Revolution, Brazil became far more aware of the French Revolution.

Brazil's known musical patrimony begins in the second half of the eighteenth century. The earliest music with a Portuguese text (found by Régis Duprat) is a cantata dated 1759 consisting of recitative and da capo aria for soprano, paired violins and continue. Sung at Bahia during the 6 July 1759 session of the newly founded Academia dos Renascidos, this cantata celebrates the recovery from an illness of the academy's patron José Mascarenhas Pacheco Pereira de Mello, who had recently arrived from Lisbon.

The veteran mestre de capela of Bahia Cathedral who presumably wrote this delightful cantata, showing complete command of the Italian style in vogue at Lisbon in 1759, was Caetano de Mello Jesus – a native of the Bahia region and a protégé of a rich elected official of the Academia dos Renascidos. In 1759–60 he completed his Escola de Canto de Orgao, the lengthiest and most profound music treatise written in the Americas before 1850. Mello Jesus argued for the use of all the key-signatures used in J. S. Bach's Das Wohltemperiertes Clavier (1722 and 1744). Unfortunately, however, none of Mello Jesus's music using seven-sharp or any other signatures survives at Bahia, where all colonial music seems to have perished.

The study and reconstruction of the Brazilian population during the colonial era, not only its size over three centuries but also its regional components and its rhythm and patterns of growth, is a task which is only now beginning to interest Brazilian scholars. Historical demography has begun to be accepted as a new research discipline with a rigorous, scientific methodology. Without data, however, there is no demography, and in the case of Brazil there is practically no statistical information for the first 250 years of its existence. What useful information there is for the study of population is incomplete, indirect, and only in exceptional cases serialized. Therefore, no really elaborate demographic analysis can be carried out on the basis of this type of information. This is what is called the pre-statistical phase in Brazilian population studies. During this period, no direct head-count was carried out, either on a general or regional, or even a sectoral basis. Moreover, church records (baptismal, marriage, and death registers), even when kept regularly, can hardly be said to have accounted for the whole population. What is worse, however, is that even these have rarely survived intact for posterity.

For the second half of the eighteenth century, the situation with regard to sources of information on the population of Brazil begins to improve. As a result of the mercantilist policies of the marquis of Pombal, the first direct censuses began to be carried out of the inhabitants of the colonial towns and cities, together with their surrounding area, the municipalities.