Belonging to a distinguished family, he was the second son of Captain Diego de Cáceres Ovando and his wife Isabel Flores, a native of the town of Brozas.

Hernán Cortés, a family acquaintance and distant relative, was supposed to sail to the Americas in this expedition, but was prevented from making the journey by an injury he sustained while hurriedly escaping from the bedroom of a married woman of Medellín.

Estimates of the Taino population at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards in 1492 vary, with Anderson Córdova giving a maximum of 500 000 people inhabiting the island.

[7] By the 1507 census, according to Bartolomé de las Casas, battlefield slaughter, enslavement and disease had reduced the native population to 60 000 people, and the decline continued.

He also developed the mining industry, introduced the cultivation of sugar cane with plants imported from the Canary Islands, and commissioned expeditions of discovery and conquest throughout the Caribbean.

Ovando allowed Spanish settlers to use the natives in forced labour, a system known as encomienda,[3] to provide food for the colonists and for ships returning to Spain.

Pursuant to a deathbed promise he made to his wife Queen Isabella I, King Ferdinand II of Aragon recalled Ovando to Spain in 1509 to answer for his treatment of the native people.

Diego Columbus was appointed his successor as governor, but the Spanish Crown permitted Ovando to retain possession of the property he brought back from the Americas.