Puente de Boyacá and Lovely Countryside

Leo and I had discussed for a long time where we wanted to travel to in Colombia.  I threw in Choco at the last minute, and we knew we wanted to go to Cartagena and Santa Marta with the kids. But there were so many options after that.  I would have loved to see the Cafetera region, or down to Los Nevadas National Park, San Agustín, or Leticia and the Amazon (Leo banned all talk of that after Choco) or the Llanos.  But after discussing it a lot, we decided to road trip to San Gil, because we thought it would have the MOST activities the kids would enjoy.  San Gil is called the Adventure Capital of Colombia.  But our first stop on our road trip there was Puente de Boyacá (the bridge in the above photo.)

I tell Colombians I like Boyacá and their response is always like, "Why?" and a little shake of the head in disbelief.  But it's a lot like Cundinamarca (my favorite!)--a little chilly and just green with all these little small towns.  I don't know, I think it was just when I visited Colombia the first time, driving through Boyacá was just so lovely to me since I was out of the Bogotá and it just seemed so Andino. (I guess it not being covered in a massive city means I like it is pretty silly 🤷‍♀️).

Fun car.

These photos don't really capture how pretty the landscape was.  

Celery?   I think it's celery.

See, now who could possibly say Boyacá isn't beautiful?   But yeah, not much to do there to be truthful.

So Puente de Boyacá is the site of the most famous battle between the revolutionary forces of Simón Bolívar and the Spanish army, and heralded the Spanish losing the war.  According to Wikipedia "the result of the battle was a decisive victory for Santander, 1800 Spanish prisoners along with the Spanish commander were captured."  (Francisco Paula de Santander was the general leading the bayonet charge across the bridge.) 

The kids had fun on the monuments. 

This is: The Von Miller Monument (for German sculptor Ferdinand Freiherr von Miller), depicting five allegoric female figures symbolic of the Bolivarian countries, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, surrounding Simón Bolívar.  (thanks Wikipedia!)

So this was a plaque commemorating the legion of mostly Irish and Scottish soldiers that fought at the Battle of Boyacá.  Basically tons of Irish and Scottish soldiers were out of a job after the Napoleonic Wars ended and a bunch came and joined the revolutionary army fighting in Colombia. One of Simón Bolívar's aide de camps was Daniel O'Leary born in County Cork, Ireland.  Anyway, that was totally random, but it's kind of fun when I'm working on genealogy records and find random kids named a funny mix of Irish and Spanish names. 

 

This statue was actually of Santander.  He was the 2nd president of Colombia.  Simón Bolivar (from what I've read) was pretty idealistic, ie Free all the slaves!  Give women the right to vote!! Limit the Catholic church's influence!! Unite ALL of South America into one country!!! Etc.  But that of course didn't fly with everyone and there was a lot of backlash ie coup and assassination attempts.  Santander was kind of the more realistic one who had experience in law who came in and made a lot of compromises trying to keep Colombia a country instead of splintering into even more pieces ie Bolivia, Venezuela etc.  We lived just a few blocks from Santander's house in Bogotá and we never went.  I'm still sad about that.

Here's a painting of the battle with Santander on the horse in the middle of it.

 

Here's an interesting video about the battle if you want to watch more. 

And I actually really enjoyed this movie.  Might be a scene or two to skip over, but overall I thought it was well done.  Simon Bolivar is definitely never boring.