When you read about the event and try to match this body of Spaniards up against Midwestern or Tennessee Valley sites/events you can see there was a possibility they could have simply gone due West, past the Southernmost point of the Appalachians, and then gone North to the Ohio (then believed to be the upper Mississippi), crossed over and founded some sort of "La Villa Real" in a defensible area in Southern Indiana or Ohio.
Take a good look at Laurel Indiana some time ~ There's a Spanish town layout in the core. It's up on the Indiana escarpment, and has access to the Whitewater river (which takes you to the Ohio) and to the Miami river a few miles further which also takes you to the Ohio.
This place was abandoned when the first English settlers came to the area, and stayed abandoned until the 1830s or so.
I suspect there's a map somewhere with all these places the Spaniards settled at marked.
The Ayllon colony could very well have gotten to this area ahead of the great drought of of the 1560 to 1600 period ~ and prospered in some manner. They would have been equipped with tools and knowledge to build grist mills and distilleries. Alcohol could get you a lot of furs and gold.
Remember, there were NO FRENCH in this region until AFTER 1604 and they seem to have not had any maps. All their riverine expeditions were NEW STUFF to them. When De Soto came in 1541 he had information about where he wanted to go ~ there were sources that could have been in place for two decades!
There is a lot of new stuff being written about the early Americas. Charles Mann’s “1491” and “1493” are two recent examples.
‘When you read about the event and try to match this body of Spaniards up against Midwestern or Tennessee Valley sites/events you can see there was a possibility they could have simply gone due West, past the Southernmost point of the Appalachians, and then gone North to the Ohio (then believed to be the upper Mississippi), crossed over and founded some sort of “La Villa Real” in a defensible area in Southern Indiana or Ohio.’
And then there are the Melungeons. There are people in eastern Kentucky who look very Spanish (or more accurately, Portuguese). Somebody from Iberia made it into the southern mountains a long time ago...
looked at the laurel map. the outline is certainly there. the location of the plaza doesn’t appear visible anymore (e.g. there are streets and buildings where it would have been) and the frequency of n-s streets seems more regular than most colonial spanish towns I have seen drawings of.