Cundinamarca

The paradox at its heart is easy to state and hard to resolve. Until 1813 Cundinamarca insisted it was loyal to Ferdinand VII, a king imprisoned in France, while behaving in every practical respect like a sovereign state: electing its own assembly, raising its own army, refusing orders from the congress of the other provinces and signing treaties as a party in its own right. Its constitution of 1811 was a monarchy. Its government was a dictatorship. Its leading man, Antonio Nariño, had been imprisoned for translating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and ended his life as a brief vice-president of Gran Colombia.

For the map, Cundinamarca matters as the counter-case to the federalist story that dominates English-language accounts of Spanish American independence. Where the United Provinces of New Granada argued that sovereignty belonged to the provinces, Bogotá argued that it belonged to the nation, and that the nation meant the old viceroyalty governed from the old viceregal capital — by the people who had always governed it. That argument lost, twice: to the federalists in 1814, and then to Spain in 1816. What survived was the name.

At a glance

What was Cundinamarca, and why does 1811 matter?

The country itself is a high plain at 2,600 metres, roughly 25 kilometres across and 50 long, ringed by the mountains that separate the Magdalena valley from the llanos. Bogotá sits at its eastern edge, against the cerros of Guadalupe and Monserrate, where the land rises sharply and the climate turns cold and wet. Beyond the plain the province fell away in ridges and ravines towards the Magdalena and the warm country of the west, and north towards Ubaté and Chocontá, where the soil is good and the nights are hard.

That geography explains a great deal of the politics. The Sabana produced wheat, maize, potatoes and cattle for a city that could not feed itself, and the wheat was good enough to be sold downriver. The salt works at Zipaquirá and Nemocón, a few hours' ride north of the capital, were among the most valuable single assets in the viceroyalty, worked for the crown as a monopoly. Bogotá itself had the mint, the audiencia, the cathedral, the archbishop, a public library of more than 20,000 volumes looted from the Jesuits, and a small but argumentative class of lawyers, priests and minor officials who had been educated at the Colegio de San Bartolomé and the Colegio del Rosario and could not be promoted any further while Spaniards held the top posts.

Population figures for the province do not exist in any form a modern historian would trust. What does exist is the padrón of the city compiled under Francisco José de Caldas and published in El Correo Curioso in 1801: 195 blocks, 4,517 inhabited houses, 8,191 secular men and 9,890 secular women, plus 719 nuns, 489 monks and 175 students in two colleges, and more than a thousand beggars and transients left out. The total came to 21,474. José Manuel Restrepo, who knew the city, thought the true figure was nearer 25,000 to 28,000, and the censuses of the period were not precise instruments. For the province as a whole the sources give nothing better than impression: a few towns of two or three thousand people, a dense scatter of hamlets, and a rural population that was overwhelmingly indigenous or mestizo, living on land held by a small number of families and religious houses.

The name is older than the state and its meaning is disputed. Liborio Zerda's derivation from Chibcha — Cundurcunca, Cutirimarca — gives "land or height where the condor lives", and most linguists accept a Chibcha root; the Gobernación's own website prefers an Aymara origin, which is a minority view and probably a patriotic flourish. What matters for 1811 is the constitutional claim. The first article of the constitution does not say that the province is inventing a name. It says the province "adopts and wishes to conserve its primitive and original name of Cundinamarca" — a claim to antiquity that made the new state look like the restoration of something old rather than the seizure of something new. The colonial province had been called Santa Fe, or Bogotá, in official papers; Cundinamarca was the country's name in common speech, and the constitution promoted it.

One warning about the map. The border data draws Cundinamarca for a single year, 1814, and gives the polygon an area of about 225,000 km². The state existed from 1811 to 1816, and 225,000 km² is roughly nine times the area of the modern department, which is 24,210 km². The polygon is therefore not the territory Nariño governed; it is what the underlying dataset records for a belligerent in a civil war whose borders were never surveyed and never fixed. Read it as a position on a map of the war, not as an administrative boundary.

How did the collapse of the Spanish monarchy reach Bogotá?

The news arrived in stages, and each stage widened the space for local action. In 1808 Napoleon's troops entered Spain, and at Bayonne in May the abdication of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII was extracted and a Bonaparte put on the throne. The response of the Spanish monarchy was to invent a legitimacy that did not depend on the king's person: juntas of notables governing in the name of the absent Ferdinand, first at Seville and then through a Supreme Central Junta. That invention travelled to America, and it was the model for everything that followed. If sovereignty could reside in a junta at Seville, it could reside in a junta at Bogotá, Quito or Caracas.

In New Granada the immediate pressure came from the north and the south. Quito had risen in August 1809 and been crushed; Venezuela followed in April 1810. The viceroy, Antonio Amar y Borbón, was sixty-eight, cautious and unpopular, married to a woman widely accused of selling favours. In September 1809 he convened meetings of notables to discuss the Quito crisis and then opened secret files against the creoles who had spoken too freely at them, among them Camilo Torres, José Acevedo y Gómez and Frutos Joaquín Gutiérrez. That was the moment the loyal opposition began to organise. The same year Torres wrote the Memorial de Agravios, an argument that the American kingdoms were equal to Spain in law and had the right to govern themselves while the monarchy was captive; the cabildo never adopted it and it was not printed until 1832, but it circulated in manuscript and set out the constitutional case that the creoles would use for the next decade.

The economic background was less dramatic but just as corrosive. Salomón Kalmanovitz's estimates, cited by Rodrigo Llano Isaza, put New Granada's output per head at about 27 silver pesos against nearly 42 in Mexico, and its exports at about 2 million pesos a year against 8 for Peru and 18 for Mexico. Contraband through Riohacha and Mompox was estimated at roughly 15 per cent of legal trade, which tells you what merchants thought of the tariff. The crown's American revenue was squeezed by the European war just as its American subjects were being asked to pay more for less protection. When the Supreme Central Junta fell in January 1810 and the Regency of Cádiz took over, the last shred of uncontested authority in Spain disappeared.

Bogotá's creoles did not, in 1810, want independence. They wanted the same thing the peninsular juntas had: a government of locals, in the king's name, with the powers that the old regime had refused them. What made the summer of 1810 explosive was that the provinces wanted the same thing, separately, and each of them had a stronger legal claim to autonomy than the viceregal capital had to obedience.

What happened on 20 July 1810?

The plan was made in an observatory. Caldas's astronomical office in the palace garden was the meeting place where the conspirators settled the script, and the script needed a Spaniard to lose his temper. José González Llorente — known to history by his mother's surname, hence "the vase of Llorente" — kept the best shop on the Calle Real, importing cloth, porcelain and scales and exporting quinine. The brothers Francisco and Antonio Morales went to borrow a flower vase for a dinner in honour of Antonio de Villavicencio, the royal commissioner just arrived from Spain, and Llorente refused and said something insulting. It was a Thursday, a market day, and the square was full.

The crowd was managed rather than spontaneous, but the anger was real and it was directed at the peninsular merchants and officials who had monopolised the best offices. By six in the evening the cabildo was sitting in extraordinary session, with the people in the square having proclaimed Acevedo y Gómez as their spokesman. A deputation went to Amar, who agreed to hand over the arms and a company of the Auxiliary Battalion under Captain Antonio Baraya. The act of that evening is often treated as Colombia's declaration of independence. It is nothing of the kind. It creates a Supreme Junta to govern "interimly, while the same junta forms the constitution which may secure the public happiness", and it does so on the basis of "liberty, mutual independence" of the provinces, "linked only by a federal system, whose representation shall reside in this capital". The junta named Amar as its president and deposed him five days later; he and the vicereine left for Cartagena on 14 August.

Two things then happened that shaped the next five years. First, the junta sent circulars to the provinces asking them to elect deputies to a congress, and the provinces elected them on terms that assumed they were sovereign bodies doing the inviting, not subordinates answering a summons. Santa Fe's own act had conceded the federal principle before anyone had thought through what it meant. Second, the popular wing of the movement refused to wait. On 21 July José María Carbonell established a rival "tumultuary junta" in San Victorino — the name is Morillo's — and for twenty-five days it functioned as a second government of the city, unrecognised by the notables and unable to consolidate. It was the first sign that the patriot coalition contained at least three parties: the office-holding creoles, the popular radicals, and the provinces.

The junta governed for the rest of 1810 without a constitution, printing a gazette, corresponding with other juntas, and discovering that it had no revenue, no army worth the name and no agreed basis on which to summon anyone. Its answer was to convoke an electoral college for the province alone. That decision — to constitute the province first and negotiate the nation afterwards — is the origin of Cundinamarca.

Why did Bogotá and Tunja fall out?

Because two theories of sovereignty could not both be true, and each had a plausible claim. The federalists argued that the abdication at Bayonne had dissolved the political bond and returned sovereignty to the peoples; the old viceroyalty was therefore a league of free provinces, each of which had constituted itself and each of which sent delegates to a congress of equals. The centralists argued that sovereignty had returned to the nation, that the nation was the whole of the old viceroyalty, and that its natural government was the one already sitting in the capital, with the bureaucracy, the mint, the archive and the university. The first theory was held by most of the provinces. The second was held by the province that contained the state apparatus.

The congress of the provinces had met at Bogotá's invitation in December 1810 and had drifted away from the capital as the quarrel hardened; by 1812 it was sitting at Tunja, in the province of the same name. Its Act of Federation of 27 November 1811, whose fifth article declared independence from Spain outright, was ratified by Antioquia, Cartagena, Pamplona, Neiva and Tunja. Cundinamarca did not ratify it. Cartagena had already declared absolute independence on 11 November, and the two declarations together made the federal congress the most radical body in New Granada, and Bogotá the most conservative.

Bogotá's own practice made the quarrel worse. In the course of 1811 the province annexed Mariquita and parts of Neiva, on no authority but its own, which gave it control of the road down the Magdalena and the quinine country. A treaty signed with the United Provinces on 18 May 1812 recognised those annexations and provided for a future federal capital outside any state's jurisdiction; Cundinamarca entered the federation on those terms. On 8 October the federal government ordered Nariño to bring provincial law into line with the federal pact. He refused. The congress declared war.

The quarrel was not, in its own terms, absurd. A confederation of provinces each retaining its own army, tariff and citizenship could not raise a continental army or a continental revenue, and everyone could see that Spain would come back. A unitary state governed from Bogotá would have solved that problem by handing permanent power to the smallest province and the least representative assembly in the country. Neither side could offer the other a guarantee, and neither trusted the other's army. What made it lethal was timing: the argument was being settled by force at exactly the moment the royalists in Pasto, Quito and Venezuela were recovering, and the same quarrel between centralists and federalists was being fought out, with more bloodshed, in the Río de la Plata.

What did the constitution of 1811 actually say?

It was adopted by a College of Constituent and Electoral Deputies — 40 of them, representing the parishes of Bogotá, the towns of the Sabana, Zipaquirá, La Mesa, Guaduas and the rest — sitting from February 1811. It was approved on 30 March and promulgated on 4 April by Jorge Tadeo Lozano, as president, in a decree that styles him "Vicegerent of the Person of the King". The decree's opening formula is the whole problem in one line: "Don Ferdinand VII, by the grace of God and by the will and consent of the people, legitimately and constitutionally represented, King of the Cundinamarqueses."

The architecture is a constitutional monarchy of a peculiar kind. Article 1 declares that the people have reassumed their sovereignty from the moment Ferdinand was captured, and that the province therefore needs a constitution. Article 2 ratifies the recognition of Ferdinand. Article 4 says the monarchy of the province shall be constitutional, with the king's power moderated by a permanent National Representation. Article 6 gives the executive to the king, assisted by ministers, and in his absence to the President of the National Representation with two councils. Article 9 creates a Senate of Censorship and Protection — five men, chaired by the vice-president — whose function is to watch all three branches for breaches of the constitution, on its own motion or on the complaint of any citizen, and to conduct the residencia review of every official when he leaves office. That body is the most original thing in the document: an institution whose product is not law but constitutional enforcement, invented for a state with no king present to be checked.

The bill of rights is more advanced than the frame that contains it. Article 16 guarantees freedom of the press, with authors alone responsible and printers exempt, and provides that even obscene or heretical works may not be seized without hearing the author. Article 17 makes correspondence inviolable and excludes intercepted letters from evidence. Article 18 guarantees "perfect liberty in agriculture, industry and commerce", subject only to temporary patents. Article 19 commits the province to a National Congress of all the provinces of the old viceroyalty, with representation by territory or population, and article 20 reserves provincial sovereignty over everything not delegated. Article 3 makes Catholicism the only lawful religion, publicly and privately, funded by the province. Article 2 of Title II forbids any other worship, public or private.

So the constitution is neither a sham nor a republic. It is a serious attempt to constitute a state that could not yet say out loud what it was: a state that had taken sovereignty, could not return it because the king was in a French prison, and would not yet renounce him because to do so would have handed the federalists the argument that the viceroyalty had dissolved into its parts. The condition was explicit. Sovereignty was delegated to Ferdinand only on his return — a return that, as it happened, never came in the lifetime of the state.

The revision of 1812 removed the fiction. A convention of 60 electors, empowered for the purpose, turned the state into a republic with a "popular representative government", inserted a section on the rights and duties of man — equality before the law, liberty, security, property — and extended the primary franchise to citizens over twenty-one inscribed in the civic list, plus married men living from their own income or labour. The text's own preamble is candid about the haste of the first version: the 1811 constitution had been drafted "precipitately, to satisfy the wishes and entreaties of the peoples, who demanded that something be given them quickly". Its dating is a muddle in the sources — the revising convention is dated 19 September 1811 in some printings and the reform promulgated in 1812 — and the honest statement is that the republic was constituted in the course of 1812, not on a single clean day.

Who was Antonio Nariño?

He was born in Bogotá on 9 April 1765 into a family with money and connections, educated at San Bartolomé, and made alcalde of the city at twenty-four. He collected a library of more than two thousand volumes, ran a literary circle he called "the sublime arcane of philanthropy", and in 1793 got hold of a French account of the revolution and translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, printing it on his own press. Two hundred copies, of which he said he burned all but two. He was denounced, tried, acquitted, retried, and in October 1795 sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in Africa, with his property confiscated. He escaped at Cádiz in March 1796, spent a year in Europe and America, surrendered voluntarily in Bogotá in July 1797, and was held in Cartagena and Bogotá until the revolution released him in June 1810.

That biography gave him a moral authority no one else in Bogotá had, and a temperament that wasted it. He reached the capital in October 1810, was made secretary of the first congress, and quickly found the federalists intolerable. In 1811 he founded La Bagatela, a weekly that combined political theory with personal invective of a kind that had not been printed in New Granada before. His target was Jorge Tadeo Lozano, the naturalist and Marquis of San Jorge who had presided over the electoral college and become the state's first president. Lozano was accused of weakness, of family scandal, of indecision. On 19 September 1811 a riot in the city, which Nariño's campaign had done much to provoke, forced Lozano and his vice-president to resign, and the legislature elected Nariño president with enlarged executive powers — the beginning of the pattern by which every crisis in Cundinamarca ended with more power concentrated in his hands.

He was not a democrat and never claimed to be. His centralism was administrative before it was ideological: he had spent fifteen years watching a bureaucracy he considered competent being directed by men he considered fools, and he believed that a nation at war needed one government, one army and one treasury. When the congress at Tunja ordered him to conform, he refused. When his own general, Baraya, changed sides and marched on the capital with the federal army, Nariño asked the legislature for extraordinary powers, got them, and had himself named dictator. The pattern repeated in June 1813, when he was confirmed in office with dictatorial powers for the duration of the war.

He was also, by the standards of the era, a moderniser: a defender of the press he used without restraint, a promoter of manufactures and of the quinine trade, an enemy of the Inquisition's jurisdiction, and a man who wrote his own propaganda rather than paying for it. His enemies called him a tyrant; his friends called him the Precursor. Both were describing the same trait, which was an inability to share power with people he did not respect.

How did the first civil war go?

Badly, then well, then irrelevantly. Nariño marched out of Bogotá on 26 November 1812 with perhaps 800 to 1,500 men and ten guns, intending to break the congress at Tunja. Baraya, who had been sent to attack the federalists, had already changed sides and declared Nariño a usurper, taking Santander, Caldas and a substantial part of the army with him. On 2 December the two forces met at the Alto de la Virgen above Ventaquemada. The fighting began at four in the afternoon and lasted two hours; the Cundinamarcan retreat turned into a rout in the dark, with the loss of the artillery park, about forty dead and fifty prisoners. Nariño got back to Bogotá, resigned, found no replacement, and was reinstalled as dictator.

The federal army followed slowly — more than a week late, which gave the capital time to prepare — and invested Bogotá on 24 December. The siege was decided on 9 January 1813 in the streets of San Victorino, where Nariño's troops, fighting among the houses and ditches with no room to manoeuvre, broke the federal assault and captured most of Baraya's force. It was a comprehensive victory and it settled nothing. Both sides could see that the royalists were the real danger; a truce was patched up, the federal congress recognised Cundinamarca's position, and the two armies turned to face the common enemy.

Two things followed in the summer of 1813 that made Cundinamarca look, briefly, like a country. On 16 July the province declared its total independence of Spain, of France and of any other foreign power, which ended the fiction of the captive king and aligned Bogotá with Cartagena and Tunja. The state adopted a coat of arms on 19 July and a flag on 7 August. And Nariño, confirmed as president with dictatorial powers, took command of a combined Cundinamarcan and federal army and marched south.

Why did Nariño march to Pasto?

Because the royalists had already opened the second front. After the collapse of the Quito revolution in 1812, the captain-general Toribio Montes had rebuilt royal government in the Audiencia of Quito and pushed north under Juan de Sámano, who took Popayán on 1 July 1813, reached Cali by the 18th, beat a small patriot column at Cartago on 5 August and then withdrew south, having done enough to put the Cauca valley back under the king. Nariño left Bogotá on 21 September with about 1,200 infantry, 200 cavalry and a handful of federal battalions, crossed the central range by the Guanacas pass, and came down the Magdalena to La Plata to mount his counter-offensive.

The campaign was a masterpiece of mountain soldiering and a disaster of strategy. On 30 December 1813 José María Cabal's 300 men defeated 700 royalists at Alto Palacé, and Sámano abandoned Popayán. On 15 January 1814 Nariño fought Sámano again at the Calibío hacienda, three hours of close fighting in which the royalist colonel Ignacio Asín was killed and the Cundinamarcans took the enemy's artillery; Sámano fled to Pasto and was replaced by Melchor Aymerich. Then the offensive stalled for two months, because the country between Popayán and Pasto is ravines and cloud forest held by hostile militia, and because Nariño had no reinforcements coming.

He moved only on 22 March. The Juanambú river was forced after two weeks of fighting in April; the Cundinamarcans won again at Tacines on 9 May 1814 and came down onto the ejidos, the common lands outside Pasto, on 10 May. There the campaign ended. The city's inhabitants — not a royalist army in the conventional sense, but the whole armed population of a town that had been fighting patriots for four years — met the patriots in the streets and fields, and Nariño, who had ridden ahead with his staff, was wounded, separated from his reserve, and left for dead by his own rearguard. The army broke and fled north. Days later, hiding in the hills, he surrendered to the authorities at Pasto.

He spent a year as a prisoner in Pasto and then was sent to Cádiz, where he remained until the liberal revolution of 1820 released him. The southern campaign cost Cundinamarca its best troops, its best commander and its reputation, and it handed the federalists the argument they had been waiting for: that the centralist state could not defend the country and had spent the army it had built in a private war.

How did Cundinamarca lose its independence to its neighbours?

To a patriot army, not a Spanish one. The collapse of the second Venezuelan republic in 1814 sent Simón Bolívar and thousands of Venezuelan soldiers and refugees into New Granada. Bolívar reached Cartagena on 25 September, went to Tunja, presented himself to the federal congress on 22 November, was made a lieutenant-general, and on 28 November was given command of an army of New Granadans and Venezuelans with orders to take Bogotá. The next day the congress declared war on Cundinamarca. Its government, under Manuel de Bernardo Álvarez — Nariño's uncle, who had taken over when Nariño marched south — refused to submit.

The siege lasted three days. Bolívar's army was perhaps 5,000 men, of whom about 1,000 were Venezuelan veterans and the rest recruits and levies from Tunja, Socorro and the Cundinamarcan highlands; the defence had about 2,000, of whom fewer than half were trained soldiers. On 3 December an assembly of more than a thousand "fathers of the family" met in the convent of San Agustín and voted to resist. Trenches were dug by clergy and women; the archbishop, Juan Bautista Sacristán, excommunicated Bolívar and his officers; knives were distributed to the women of the city. There were forts at San Diego, La Alameda and San Victorino. The federalists attacked on 10 December, and by the 12th had taken the city in house-to-house fighting, at a cost of 204 killed and 100 wounded on their own side — casualties severe enough that the troops looted Bogotá afterwards, killing Spaniards and sacking houses.

The terms were that the government of Cundinamarca recognised the supremacy of the United Provinces, handed over its weapons and stores, and in return the lives and property of the inhabitants were spared. The constitution of 1811 was repealed on 10 December 1814. José Miguel Pey, who had been alcalde in 1810 and president of the junta, was made governor of the province on 20 December. Cundinamarca became an administrative department of a federation it had spent four years refusing to join, and its army was folded into Bolívar's.

This is the point at which the standard English-language narrative and the Colombian one diverge most sharply. In the English account, 1814 is the year Bolívar began the work of liberation. In Bogotá it is the year the capital was stormed by a foreign-backed army because it would not accept a congress in Tunja. Both are true; the second is the one that explains why the city's ruling families remembered the federalists with more bitterness than they remembered Morillo.

What did the reconquest destroy?

Everything the patriots had built, in a little over a year. Ferdinand VII returned to Madrid in March 1814, abolished the constitution of Cádiz, and decided to reconquer the colonies with the largest expedition Spain had ever sent to America: the Expeditionary Army of the Costa Firme, some 10,000 to 12,000 men and sixty transports under Pablo Morillo, a veteran of the Peninsular War, with Pascual Enrile commanding the squadron. It sailed from Cádiz on 17 February 1815, landed at Carúpano and Margarita in April, secured Venezuela, and put about 4,200 men ashore at Santa Marta on 23 July.

Morillo's first objective was Cartagena, the only fortified port the republicans held. The siege began on 26 August 1815 with some 11,000 Spanish troops against a garrison of about 3,600 and a civilian population swollen by refugees to 18,000. Morillo, having lost his siege train when a transport blew up, decided to starve the city rather than storm it. The defenders held for 105 days; in the last three weeks they ate leather, and there were cases of cannibalism. On the night of 5 December the authorities and part of the garrison tried to break out by sea under the French corsair Louis-Michel Aury; of nearly 2,000 who sailed, about 600 reached Haiti. The city fell on 6 December 1815. Of the 18,000 civilians, some 6,000 had died of hunger and disease.

While Cartagena was under siege, a second royalist column under Sebastián de la Calzada came down from Venezuela into the llanos of Casanare, was checked at Chire on 31 October by Joaquín Ricaurte, and then crossed the Eastern Cordillera by the Chita pass into Tunja province. The republic's main army, under Custodio García Rovira, met it at Cachirí on 22 February 1816 and was destroyed. Bogotá was occupied on 6 May 1816. The government fled south and its last formed army was broken at the Cuchilla del Tambo on 29 June. Nariño's Cundinamarca had already ceased to exist; what disappeared in 1816 was the federation that had replaced it.

Morillo then installed what Colombians call the Reign of Terror. A permanent council of war condemned patriots without defence: José María Carbonell, the agitator of 20 July, was hanged on 19 June 1816 and then shot when the rope failed; Jorge Tadeo Lozano, the state's first president, was executed on 6 July; Camilo Torres, president of the congress, on 5 October; Francisco José de Caldas, the scientist who had hosted the conspiracy in his observatory, at the end of October. Alongside the councils of war there were councils of purification, for those who had collaborated and wished to "expiate" their conduct; juntas of sequestration, which confiscated patriot property for the army; and tribunals of the Inquisition, used against patriot priests. Even Francisco Montalvo, the viceroy restored at Santa Marta, protested at the scale of it.

The number executed is not known. Estimates in the thousands circulate, including a figure of 7,000 for 1816–1819, but no reliable count exists and the higher figures rest on nineteenth-century compilations. What is certain is the political effect: the killings eliminated the entire civilian leadership of the first republic, and the confiscations and forced loans turned much of the surviving population against the restored regime. Guerrilla bands in Casanare, Socorro, Antioquia and the Magdalena valley kept the war alive, and it was from those bands, and from the Venezuelan exiles, that Bolívar built the army that crossed the Pisba in 1819 and destroyed the royalist army at Boyacá on 7 August.

Was the "Foolish Fatherland" really foolish?

The phrase is Colombian: la Patria Boba, the foolish fatherland, conventionally credited to Nariño and repeated by every schoolbook since. It carries a judgement — that the years between 1810 and 1816 were a squabble of lawyers and provincial notables who could not stop arguing long enough to notice that Spain was coming back. On the facts, the charge has some force. The provinces fought two civil wars in three years; Cundinamarca annexed its neighbours; Nariño's dictatorship and his southern campaign consumed the army that might have defended the Cauca; and the federal congress chose that moment to declare war on Bogotá rather than prepare the coast. No account of the period can ignore that.

But the judgement has been under sustained attack in Colombia since the 1990s, and the revisionists have the better of the documentary argument. The 1811 constitution is the first codified constitution written in Spanish America, drafted and promulgated a year before Cádiz, with a bill of rights, freedom of the press, inviolability of correspondence and a body specifically designed to enforce constitutional limits. The 1812 revision created a republic and put the primary vote in the hands of every man over twenty-one on the civic register. The period produced elected assemblies in a dozen towns, a partisan press, public political argument, and the first generation of Colombian politicians to treat office as something derived from voters rather than from the crown. Armando Martínez Garnica and Isidro Vanegas, among others, have argued that the "eclipse" framing misreads what was actually a foundational constitutional moment — as Fabio Ernesto Fandiño puts it, the debate over whether 1811 was the juridical genesis of independence is a live one, and the answer turns on whether you think a state is made by a declaration or by a constitution.

The more interesting question is why the argument between centralists and federalists was unresolvable. It was not a dispute about abstract political theory, though both sides quoted Rousseau and Montesquieu. It was a dispute about who would pay for the war and who would command the army, conducted by men who had been colleagues in the same cabildo and the same literary societies and who knew exactly what each other wanted. Bogotá wanted the revenues of the provinces and the right to appoint their governors; the provinces wanted the revenues of Bogotá and the right to appoint their own. Neither could concede, because conceding meant handing the other the means to abolish it.

What the argument cost was the country. Between 1810 and 1819 New Granada lost, on the estimate of the Colombian military historian José Roberto Ibáñez Sánchez, something like 500,000 dead out of a population that barely reached two million — a quarter of the people, in a war that was fought over whether the viceroyalty should be one state or several. That figure is an estimate and should be treated as one, but the order of magnitude is not in dispute: this was a demographic catastrophe as well as a political failure.

What became of the name?

Cundinamarca survived its state. When Gran Colombia was organised in 1819 the old province became the Department of Cundinamarca, one of the new republic's three great departments, with Bogotá as its capital; that department was much larger than the 1811 province, covering the whole centre of the country. In 1831, when Venezuela and Ecuador left and the Republic of New Granada was constituted, the department was broken up into provinces, and the province around the capital was called Bogotá, not Cundinamarca. The name came back in 1852 for a small province north-east of the city with its capital at Chocontá, and again in 1857, when the sovereign state of Cundinamarca was created out of the provinces of Bogotá, Mariquita, Neiva, Tequendama and Zipaquirá. The constitution of 1886 turned the states into departments, and the Department of Cundinamarca has existed under that name ever since.

Its modern shape is the result of two amputations. In 1905 Rafael Reyes split it into three, and in 1954 Bogotá absorbed six neighbouring municipalities — Bosa, Engativá, Fontibón, Suba, Usaquén and Usme — becoming a special district, confirmed as the Capital District by the constitution of 1991. The department now has 116 municipalities, an area of 24,210 km² and, without Bogotá, about 3.6 million people. The city sits inside it but is not governed by it, which is an odd arrangement with deep roots: the same tension between the capital and the province that ruined the state in 1814 is now a matter of metropolitan finance and water charges.

So "Cundinamarca" has meant, in turn, the highland country around Bogotá, the province that declared itself a monarchy in 1811, a department of Gran Colombia, a province of the New Granada republic, a sovereign state of the United States of Colombia, and a department of the present Colombian republic. The 1811 constitution's claim that the name was "primitive and original" was a political argument dressed as philology, and it worked: the state is forgotten, the name is on the map, and the condor, if Zerda was right, is still in it.

Common myths about Cundinamarca

Timeline of Cundinamarca

What the map shows next

At 1814 on the map Cundinamarca appears as a single block of highland around Bogotá, in the year it was annexed. The shape carries one warning: 1814 is the only year the border data draws this state at all, so the slider cannot show it forming in 1811 or vanishing in 1816. What it can show is the company the state kept in its last year — the United Provinces to the north and east, the royalists holding Pasto and the Cauca, and Cartagena still standing on the coast.

Move away from 1814 on the map and the rest of the story has to be told through other entries: the federal republic that absorbed Cundinamarca, the restoration that destroyed it, and the state that inherited the name. The company there is still that of a civil war; the polity that replaced Cundinamarca never appears under its own name. The centralist case that Nariño lost in 1814 was won in 1819, and won again in 1886, which is why the department around Bogotá is called Cundinamarca and not Bogotá.