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366 at first assigned to New Galicia, and the governor's first care was to distribute the Jalisco towns among his partisans, encroaching without scruple on the earlier encomiendas of Francisco Cortés and others in southern Jalisco, the Ávalos provinces, Colima, and even Michoacan, maintaining that the former Discoverers had not permanently occupied the territory, and that he had been obliged to reconquer it — a plea of some plausibility, were it not that the hostility of the natives and the necessity for reconquest had resulted altogether from his own outrageous acts. He founded, either immediately or within a few years, several Spanish settlements. Among these was the villa of Santiago de Compostela, in the immediate vicinity of Tepic and Jalisco towns, for a long time the capital of New Galicia.

Not long afterward Juan de Oñate was sent to establish Espíritu Santo, Called later Guadalajara, in honor of Guzman's birthplace. The first founding was