Sayri Túpac had in 1544 retreated to to the remote jungles of Vilcabamba, where he has reigned for ten years with the aid of regents after the murder of his father Manco Inca, who had waged an unsuccessful war of reconquest for more than two decades,

This has been a time of peace with the Spanish.

Viceroy Pedro de la Gasca had offered to provide Sayri Túpac with lands and houses in Cuzco if he would emerge from the isolated Vilcabamba.

Sayri Túpac had accepted, but during the preparations his relative Paullu Inca suddenly died.

This had been taken as a bad omen (or a sign of Spanish treachery), and Sayri Tupac has remained in Vilcabamba.

The Audiencia has turned over its governance to the new viceroy of Peru, Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza, 3rd Marquis of Cañete, who arrives in the colony 1556.

Although the Inca in Vilcabamba is no longer ruler of an Indigenous empire, he is still ruler of an independent native state.

Like Viceroy Gasca before him, Hurtado believes it will be safer for the Spanish if Sayri Tupac can be enticed to live in the area of Spanish settlement, where the conquistadors can control him.

Spanish forces continue to move into Argentina from the Pacific coast over the Andes.

Pedro del Castillo founds a city on March 2, 1561, in a region of foothills and high plains, naming it Ciudad de Mendoza del Nuevo Valle de La Rioja after the governor of Chile, Don García Hurtado de Mendoza.

The area had been populated before the 1560s by three tribes, the Huarpes, the Puelches, and the Incas.

The Huarpes had devised a system of irrigation that is later developed by the Spanish, allowing for an increase in population that might not have otherwise occurred.

The system is still evident today in the wide trenches that run along the city streets.

Two of the main industries of present-day Mendoza area are olive oil production and wine making; the region around Greater Mendoza is the largest wine producing area in Latin America.

The Inca’s negotiations with the Viceroyalty of Peru have taken time, but Sayri Túpac had agreed to leave Vilcabamba, traveling in a rich litter with three hundred attendants.

He had been received amicably by Viceroy Hurtado in Lima on January 5, 1560.

Sayri Túpac had renounced his claim to the Inca Empire and accepted baptism, as Diego.

In return, he had received a full pardon, the title of Prince of Yucay, and great estates with rich revenues.

He has became resident in Yucay, a day's journey northeast of Cuzco.

Significantly, he has left behind the royal red fringe, symbol of his authority.

In Cuzco, he has married his sister Cusi Huarcay after receiving a special dispensation from Pope Julius III.

They have a daughter.

Sayri Túpac never returns to Vilcabamba, dying suddenly in 1561.

His half-brother Titu Cusi Yupanqui takes control of Vilcabamba and the Inca resistance to the Spanish.

Titu Cusi suspects that Sayri Túpac has been poisoned by the Spanish.

Resistance against Spanish rule continues.

Governor Alonso de Sotomayor, amid his problems with the Mapuche insurgency in southern Chile, has also had to confront the attacks of English pirates, most notably Thomas Cavendish, who had anchored in Quintero on April 9, 1587 and been defeated by the Spanish, losing ten men.

Additionally, he has had to deal with revolts by soldiers in the south, motivated by the poverty that they suffer on account of not being paid in either gold or encomienda rights.

Alarmed by the situation and by the lack of reinforcements, Sotomayor had gone to Peru on July 30, 1592 to petition the viceroy there for more men, leaving, with the title of lieutenant governor of Chile, the old and circumspect lawyer Pedro de Viscarra, who had arrived from Spain two years earlier.

Sotomayor disembarks in August in Callao, where he learns that the king has named a new governor of Chile, Martín García Óñez de Loyola, famous for his capture of Túpac Amaru; Philip II thinks Loyola him the most likely candidate to finish the Arauco War.

Sotomayor returns to Chile to testify about and defend his actions, a tribunal from which he emerges triumphant.

He now heads towards Spain, but is detained on the road by ...

...the Viceroy of Peru, who asks Sotomayor to take charge of the province of Panama, now menaced by English invasion.

Spanish navigator and explorer Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira leads the voyage that in 1595 discovers the first islands of Polynesia known to Europeans.

He names them the Marqusas after his patron, García Hurtado de Mendoza, 5th Marquis of Cañete, who is Viceroy of Peru at this time.

Mendaña visits first Fatu Hiva and then Tahuata before continuing on to the Solomon Islands.