Playing Cards in Central and South America

Playing cards had been introduced to the Americas with explorers such as Columbus or Cortés, whose fellow countrymen were keen gamblers. By 1576 the Spaniards began to establish playing card monopolies in their South American dependencies from which they gathered revenues for the Spanish crown. The first of these was in Mexico. Illegal or contraband goods were always a problem and during the 18th and 19th centuries Italian card makers such as Pedro Bosio, Agostino Bergallo and Giuseppe Cattino supplied Spanish-suited playing cards to Spanish colonies in South America. Native Indian cards, modelled on the Spanish pack, are a curious spin-off. Designs have tended to follow Spanish models, but fashion and consumer taste has more recently been influenced by cards imported from Italy or Belgium, and by foreign manufacturers such as Dondorf,  Goodall,  Grimaud,  Muller  and  USPCC.

On his first voyage, Columbus discovered San Salvador Island, Hispaniola (now occupied by the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Cuba, and on his second voyage, Puerto Rico and Jamaica (1493). The following year, the Catholic Monarchs and John II of Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas to apportion the rights to future discoveries, drawing a line along the meridian 370 degrees west of Cape Verde Islands and granting Portugal all of the territory to the east of that line and Spain all of the territory to the west of it (1494).

Argentina    Bolivia    Brazil    Chile    Colombia    Costa Rica    Cuba    Dominican Republic    Ecuador    El Salvador    Galapagos    Guatemala    Honduras    Mexico    Nicaragua    Panama    Paraguay    Peru    Puerto Rico    Uruguay    Venezuela

You can click the countries on the map...

Above: Spanish playing cards exported to new Spanish colonies from c.1550 onwards. Cards like these would have been in use for the first 200-300 years or so after the first Spanish settlers arrived. (click the images to see more)