[3] In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed, claiming the entire western New World for Spain, including what is now Belize.

[8] Spanish missionaries arriving in 1550 evangelized the area's population of Ch'ol people (a language group belonging to ethnic group Q'eqchi' people), reaching the Amatique Bay (present Province Verapaz, in the southern half of the current Belize).

[5] However, few Spanish settled in the area because of the lack of the gold they'd come seeking and the strong resistance of the Maya people.

[8] In 1618 there is evidence of evangelization in Pucté, northern Belize, and in 1621 at Tipu with the Mopans, in the central part of the territory.

He was captured and stripped by some English near Rio de Texoc - probably the present Mullins River.

But in 1696, Spanish soldiers used Tipu as a base from which to pacify the area, with the support of missionary activities.

On 20 January 1783, shortly after the Treaty of Versailles, Britain and Spain signed a peace treaty in which Spain ceded to Britain a small part of Belize, about 1.482 square kilometres[10] located between the Hondo and Belize rivers.

The British were able to continue their harvesting of logwood in Belizean territory, even in areas that remained officially Spanish.

[10] Around the 1840s, thousands of Maya people and mestizos were driven from the area of Bacalar during the Caste War (1847-1901), [2] [11] They settled in the Corozal, Orange Walk Town, and Cayo District, as well as in the city of San Pedro in Ambergris Caye.

[13] In the 1870s-1880s, the Kekchi emigrated from Verapaz, Guatemala, where their lands had been seized for coffee plantations and many of them enslaved.

[16] Both the people of Corozal, as people from Orange Walk, descended from the Yucatec Maya and Mestizo who found refuge in Belizean soil fleeing the Caste War in the 1840s, while most hispanics from Belize City, Cayo and down South, descends from GCentral American Migrants.

the people from Guatemala make up the largest group (42.9%) of the immigrant population in Belize, followed by nationals of El Salvador and Honduras.