Pedro de Cevallos
Pedro de Cevallos was the Spanish general who was sent to the Rio de la Plata in 1776 with the largest expedition Spain had ever sent to America, a hundred ships and nine thousand men, took the Portuguese fortress of Colonia do Sacramento across the river from Buenos Aires in June 1777 and razed it, and was made the first viceroy of the new viceroyalty that Charles III had created to hold the country, with Buenos Aires as its capital. In eighteen months he opened the port to direct trade with Spain and the other colonies, which made the city, and went home to die. He was a Cantabrian, a soldier from the age of eighteen who had fought in Italy in the War of the Austrian Succession and been governor of Buenos Aires from 1756 to 1766, where he had already taken Colonia once, in 1762, and given it back under the peace of Paris, and had put down the Guarani of the Jesuit missions who resisted the boundary treaty that handed them to Portugal. The Portuguese from Brazil and the Spanish from Buenos Aires had fought over the east bank of the river and the Banda Oriental for a century. In 1776, with the Portuguese pushing south into Rio Grande, Charles III decided to settle it and to take the whole southern cone out of the hands of Lima. The decree of August 1776 made the Rio de la Plata a viceroyalty with Buenos Aires, Paraguay, Tucuman, Upper Peru with the silver of Potosi, and the Banda Oriental, and named Cevallos viceroy and commander. He sailed from Cadiz in November, took the island of Santa Catarina off Brazil in February 1777 without a fight, and Colonia in June after a short siege. He was demolishing its walls when the news came that Spain and Portugal had made peace at San Ildefonso, which confirmed what he had taken. In Buenos Aires he issued in November 1777 the decree that let the port trade freely with Spain and the Pacific ports, breaking Lima's monopoly, and the regulation of free trade of 1778 followed from Madrid. He handed over to Vertiz in June 1778 and died at Cordoba in Spain that December on his way to court, and the town of Ceballos in Argentina and Colonia's ruined walls keep his name.
- Lived: 1715 CE – 1778 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: viceroy, general, colonial administrator
