Last Spanish Forces Leave South America
The Spanish garrison of the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa surrendered in November 1825, and the last royalist holdouts at Callao in Peru capitulated in January 1826 — the end of three centuries of Spanish rule on the American mainland. Callao was the harder case. The fortress of Real Felipe was among the strongest in the Americas, and it had fallen back into royalist hands in 1824 through a mutiny of the patriot garrison over unpaid wages. It was besieged for over a year under the Spanish brigadier José Ramón Rodil, who refused every summons after Ayacucho had ended the war elsewhere, and after Spain itself had effectively abandoned the continent. The siege killed several thousand people inside, most of them civilians who had taken refuge there, from scurvy and starvation. Rodil executed suspected defeatists throughout, and surrendered in January 1826 with a few hundred survivors of some 8,000. He was decorated on his return to Spain. San Juan de Ulúa, the island fortress guarding Veracruz, had held out for four years after Mexican independence, bombarding the city intermittently, supplied from Cuba. Spain kept Cuba and Puerto Rico, which it held until 1898, and it did not formally recognise most of the new republics for decades — Mexico in 1836, Venezuela in 1845, and Honduras only in 1894. The wars had lasted sixteen years, killed several hundred thousand people, wrecked the mining economies, and left a continent of new states with borders drawn from colonial administrative boundaries and armies with no wars left to fight.
- Year: 1826 CE
- Category: Military
