In 1805, a wealthy, grieving 22-year-old named Simón Bolívar stood on the Monte Sacro in Rome and vowed to break Spain’s hold on his homeland. This deep dive looks past the statues and the label George Washington of Latin America to examine how an orphaned Creole aristocrat, raised largely by an enslaved woman named Hipólita and shaped by the radical tutor Simón Rodríguez, became a revolutionary.

The episode follows the early death of his wife María Teresa, the legal vacuum created when Napoleon deposed Ferdinand VII, the collapse of two Venezuelan republics, his exile in Jamaica, and the Haitian support that came with a demand to abolish slavery. It then covers the crossing of the Andes, Gran Colombia, Bolivia, his centralized rule and his death in 1830.

• How the colonial divide between Criollos and Peninsulares shaped his family’s wealth and political limits
• Why grief over his wife’s death likely turned a planter’s life into a consuming political mission
• The deal with Haitian president Alexandre Pétion that tied military aid to abolition
• How the 1819 crossing of the Páramo de Pisba led to victory at Boyacá
• Why his lifelong presidency and centralized megastate clashed with regional identities and how his legacy is still debated