It's simple enough. The French outright built trading ports and left the interior alone for the most part while the English and Duth built productive colonies based around a primary product to contribute to their trading empire. Tobacco and cotton for the English, furs for the French, sugar for the Dutch. There was a lot of overlap of course but those tended to be the major focuses.

The Spanish were more about building self contained, self sufficient communities that mostly did their own thing. A lot of what they built was plonked on top of extant civilizations and their infrastructure so unlike the other European states they tended to build administrative or bureaucratic cities in their colonies very early. It stands to reason, they had a MUCH larger initial population of natives to manage and the existing infrasturcture meant that large population centers could be built and maintained much earlier than the other European colonies that didn't have the bones of prior empires to build on.

While the French, British and Dutch focused on mercantilism for the most part, a lot of Spanish ideas of empire were still rooted in feudalism. Rather than dependent producer colonies or trading hubs the Spanish wanted fiefs that would manage their own affairs, keep their own peace under the authority of the Crown, pay their proper tribute, and answer their king's call to arms.

So yes, it is true that Spain was less focused on trade. Because their view of a proper empire required their colonies to be self sufficient while the British, French and Dutch model favored keeping the colonies dependent on the home country.