On 1 January 1528, the explorer Alonso de Saavedra took possession of the islands of Uluti in the name of the King of Spain.

The first European visitor to Ponapé was Pedro Fernández de Quirós, commanding the Spanish ship San Gerónimo.

The Spaniards called the island Ponapé and established the city of Santiago de la Ascensión, which became their first capital.

As it was the seat of the Spanish colony (composed of officials, military, missionaries and Filipino workers) it became known simply as Colonia or Kolonia, adjacent to the current capital, Palikir.

The island of Ponapé, in the eastern part of the archipelago, extended over 2,000,000 square kilometers of ocean, was chosen as the seat of the government by means of the triple support of Manila-Guaján-Ponapé, which also made it possible to effectively patrol that vast expanse of jurisdictional waters.

For this reason, when in 1887 there was an uprising by the indigenous people, who murdered the entire Spanish colony, a new expedition was immediately ordered to leave.

Ponapé was reached after twelve days of painful journey and what the natives had destroyed was rebuilt, locking it in a fort.

When they saw an important military presence on the island, they accepted the Spanish authority, advised by a European named Deoane, who lived among them, and who may have been the instigator of the previous rebellion.

While the Spanish domination lasted on the island, peaceful periods and skirmishes took place over that territory with a complicated morphology that made operations difficult.

Throughout those years, Spanish casualties as a result of these confrontations were proportionally numerous: in one of them, for example, there were thirty dead and fifty wounded.

After the Spanish–American War of 1898, Germany bought the island from Spain; under German sovereignty, the colony was officially named Kolonia.