Battle of Pichincha

The battle was fought on the muddy slopes of a volcano at around 3,500 metres, directly above a colonial capital whose citizens could watch it from below. Sucre's victory freed the city the next day and secured the independence of what is now Ecuador. His troops had made an exhausting overnight ascent, and the fighting began when royalist forces caught the strung-out column on the high ground. A battalion of British, Irish and Scottish volunteers, veterans of the Napoleonic wars, made a decisive intervention that helped turn the fight. Sucre, still in his twenties, went on to become the great lieutenant of the Bolivarian campaigns.

Pichincha is woven through Ecuadorian memory: the 24th of May is a national holiday, the name Sucre is attached to the capital's airport and countless streets and institutions, and a monument called the Summit of Liberty marks the height. The role of the foreign volunteers, the Albion battalion of veterans from the British Isles, is part of a wider story of European soldiers who fought through the South American independence wars and is remembered unevenly on both continents. The battle also fixes a national identity to a single dramatic setting, a capital liberated from the slopes of the volcano that stands over it. Few independence battles have so tidy a stage.