Bogotá

Three and a half centuries after Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada founded Bogotá, the Spanish writer Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo referred to the city as "The Athens of South America." Needless to say, Quesada's intention was not precisely to reproduce ancient Greece in the New World. Like his fellow Spanish conquistadors, he arrived in search of riches. Although he returned home without finding El Dorado, the city he founded eventually became famous for precisely the reasons he stood out himself. Jiménez de Quesada was no violent man; he was a law graduate, a writer, and one might even say, a poet.

When Quesada landed in 1538, he immediately understood he was on good land. Impressed by the savannah, with its rivers protected by enormous hills, he immediately decided this would be the site for the city. Not even the difficulties in building at such altitude and such distance from the sea could dissuade him. Thus, on the 6th of August, 1538, Santa Fe was founded on the West Range of the Andes, at 2,640 meters above sea level, 700 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean and 370 kilometers from the Pacific. The city was named after Santa Fe in Granada, Spain, where Quesada was from. Soon after "de Bogotá" was added to the name, after "Bacatá," the name the natives gave to the place. In 1819 it became simply "Bogotá." And when it was 453 years old, it went back to being Santa Fe (or Santafé) de Bogotá, its official name today.

Santa Fé did not remain a quiet place for long, at first because seekers of El Dorado came and went incessantly, and later because the city remained almost ungoverned. The city changed hands, from Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) to Lima (the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru) in 1550. The great distances between Nueva Granada (as Colombia was then known) and the centers of power in Hispanic America meant that the local governors worked more or less independently and at times anarchically.

For this reason, a new viceroyalty was established in Santa Fé in 1739. Thus began the cultural flourishing of the city, which reached its height toward the end of the 18th century with the "Ilustración Granadina" or Granadan Enlightenment. Figures appeared such as Celestino Mutis, who taught Newtonian physics and founded the Jardín Botánico and the Observatorio Astronómico, and Antonio Nariño, precursor of Colombia's independence.

Santa Fé was the cradle of the independence movements. The first insurrection took place on the 20th of July, 1810, the first step toward New Granada's independence. The revolutionaries won a brief independence in 1813, but Santa Fé fell under Spanish rule once again in 1816. The following period of terror finally ended on the 7th of August 1816, with Simón Bolívar's triumph in the Battle of Boyacá. Bolívar's plans included making Santa Fé the capital of Gran Colombia, a confederation of states that stretched over most of the continent. But Bolívar's dream was never realized, and the city assumed the more modest role as capital of the Republic of New Granada, which was renamed Colombia in the second half of the 19th century.