Bolívar Liberates Gran Colombia — Battle of Boyacá
Simón Bolívar crossed the Andes in 1819 and destroyed Spanish power in New Granada in three months. He had been fighting since 1810 and had been beaten repeatedly, twice into exile. By 1818 he held the Orinoco basin and little else, and a frontal campaign into Venezuela had failed. His answer was to attack where he was not expected. In May 1819, at the start of the rainy season, he took some 2,500 men — including a British Legion of Napoleonic War veterans — west across the flooded llanos of Casanare, wading for days through water, and then over the Andes by the Páramo de Pisba at over 13,000 feet. The route was chosen because the Spanish considered it impassable. He lost perhaps a quarter of his force and all his horses to cold and exhaustion, and came down into Boyacá with an army that was barely standing. He gave it two weeks to recover, fought an action at the Vargas Swamp in July, and then slipped past the Spanish commander Barreiro to cut him off from Bogotá. At the Boyacá bridge on 7 August 1819 he split the royalist column and took nearly the whole of it, including Barreiro, for a handful of casualties. The viceroy fled Bogotá with the treasury, and the capital fell three days later. Bolívar went straight to the congress at Angostura and had Gran Colombia proclaimed in December — Venezuela, New Granada and Quito as one republic. It lasted eleven years. Venezuela was secured at Carabobo in 1821 and Quito at Pichincha in 1822. Bolívar resigned in 1830 as the republic dissolved into Venezuela, New Granada and Ecuador, and died of tuberculosis that December at forty-seven.
- Year: 1819 CE
- Category: Military
