Juan Fernández (c. 1536 – c. 1604) was a Spanish explorer and navigator in the Pacific regions of the Viceroyalty of Peru and Captaincy General of Chile west of colonial South America.

The speed with which this discovery allowed him to complete the voyage led to him being brought in front of the Inquisition in Peru, and was the reason he became known as el brujo del Pacífico or "the witch of the Pacific".

After heading west for one month along the 40th parallel south, in the spring of 1576 they arrived in an island described as "mountainous, fertile, with strong-flowing rivers, inhabited by white peoples, and with all the fruits necessary to live".

The document is primarily concerned with theoretical reasons as to why such a continent must exist, and uses the supposed discoveries of Juan Fernández to bolster his theories.

University of Auckland history professor James Belich said that similar claims that the French and Chinese discovered New Zealand prior to Abel Tasman in 1642 have also been put forward.

[6] New Zealand film maker Winston Cowie's books Conquistador Puzzle Trail (2015) and Nueva Zelanda, un puzzle histórico: tras la pista de los conquistadores españoles (2016), published with the support of the Embassy of Spain to New Zealand, propose that the Ruamahnga skull and oral tradition may support the theory, with more evidence required to take it from possibility to probability.