Battle of Boyaca

In the middle of 1819 Simon Bolivar did what the royalists thought impossible, leading his army from the Orinoco plains up over the freezing Paramo de Pisba and into the heart of New Granada. The royalist commander, Jose Maria Barreiro, marched to block the road to Bogota, and on 7 August his army was caught strung out as it approached the bridge over the Teatinos river at Boyaca. Francisco de Paula Santander's vanguard seized the bridge while Jose Antonio Anzoategui's men struck the main royalist body, and within about two hours most of it had surrendered. The viceroy fled Bogota two days later. The battle secured New Granada for the independence cause and became the founding victory of what is now Colombia.

Colombian national memory places Boyaca alongside the Pisba crossing as the heroic core of independence, and the small bridge was rebuilt as a national shrine. Historians have complicated the heroic version in two directions: some stress how much the campaign relied on British and Irish volunteers and on llanero cavalry from the plains, others how far the rivalry between Bolivar and Santander, later a bitter political feud, was already visible in 1819. The date carries civic weight to this day: 7 August is the Colombian army's day and the day on which Colombian presidents take office.