Sooner or later, somebody had to do it. For centuries prior to 1500, Europeans had been visiting the Americas, unaware they were in the vicinity of a continent or two. They were just looking for good places to fish, or to get out from under the thumb of the King of Norway. But in 1492, it was Christopher Columbus who made the official ambassador-level call on the citizens of the West Indies. He brought them a load of trouble, and he brought loads of trouble home, too.

In Barcelona at the foot of Las Ramblas, stands a monument to Cristóbal Colón.

Why? Well, Columbus's voyage was not formally complete until he reported to Fernando and Isabel, who happened to be in Barcelona at the time. After all, they were the King and Queen. It wouldn't be seemly for their royal selves to travel to see Chris and besides, his home port was the crummy little burg of Cadíz, a place too poor to provide royalty-grade accommodations.

So Columbus, tired and hungry, sailed all the way around the south and east coasts of Spain to deliver the good news to his backers. And that's why Barcelona erected his monument on the waterfront: because Columbus's journey was completed successfully here.

Columbus pointed the way and now Spain had an actual colony to plunder besides those dinky Canary Islands. They were playing keep up with the Portuguese. Columbus made sure the Spanish claim to the lands he discovered would be legal by holding a ceremony in which the West Indians supposedly agreed to become a Spanish colony.

All those depictions of Columbus planting the flag and kneeling in the surf while the inhabitants looked on—in grade school I was taught that this was a noble event, when in fact, it was just a real estate scam. As Woody Guthrie said, "Some men rob you with a six gun and some men rob you with a fountain pen." Columbus returned to Spain with notarized statements of witnesses claiming the West Indian natives accepted colonization.

In less than fifty years, New World gold and silver was pouring in, setting off currency inflation that would ruin the Spanish economy, not to mention funding endless and pointless wars in Northern Europe and Italy. Inflation worked its magic of transferring wealth to landowners and noblemen while impoverishing merchants and smallholders. Industrial development came to a halt. Why make when you can buy?

And so Spain became the trust-fund kid of Europe, dripping with pricey goodies, but with no skills for survival when the money ran out. What once was the intellectual and artistic heart of the continent lost its leadership role. Over the long haul, Spain didn't benefit from its American holdings; it was destroyed by them.

And what about the West Indians? We all know the story. Columbus brought with him diseases that essentially caused genocide. The bulk of the population died out from measles, various poxes and venereal diseases, and had to be replaced post-haste with sturdy Africans, inured by centuries of contacts with Europeans and Arabs.

All over Spain and Mexico, I see statues of standing, fatherly Spaniards, either in monk's robes or armor, succoring kneeling Indians. Enlightening the heathen. Only after I became an adult did our view of relations between indigenous people and the colonialists come to recognize the terrible truth. Contact between east and west was an unmitigated disaster for westerners. And as it turns out, it sparked a great deal of misery in Europe as well.

(Some scholars, particularly Catalans, think Cristóbal Colón was Catalan, not Italian. It's interesting to note that Colón, with the accent over the o, is neither a Spanish nor an Italian word. It is a Catalan word and it means "pigeon.")