Where did Simón Bolívar grow up and live?

📍Casa Natal de Simón Bolívar, La Pastora, Caracas 1010, Venezuela

1783 – 1830

“I was born Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela in 1783, into one of the wealthiest creole families in South America. The Bolívar house in Caracas was a mansion — we owned cacao plantations and silver mines and the social position that came with old colonial wealth. My parents died before I was ten and I was raised by tutors, including Simón Rodríguez, who introduced me to Rousseau and the Enlightenment ideas that became the ideology of the independence movements I led. I was educated in Europe and was in Madrid and Paris during the Napoleonic period — watching Napoleon crown himself Emperor gave me both inspiration and warning. I returned to Caracas and spent the next twenty years liberating six nations. Caracas was the beginning: the wealth that gave me freedom, the tutors who gave me ideas, the colonial city that gave me a cause.”

👍 LovedThe Enlightenment education that gave me the vocabulary of liberty. The South American landscape in its overwhelming scale. The sense that Spanish colonial rule was an injustice that could be ended.

👎 DislikedThe deaths of my parents and then my wife María Teresa, which I believed freed me for the cause. The impossible difficulty of keeping the liberated nations united. The final years of political failure and exile.

Map showing where Simón Bolívar lived — Casa Natal de Simón Bolívar, La Pastora, Caracas 1010, Venezuela

🗺️ Approximate location today

Satellite view of Simón Bolívar's home at Casa Natal de Simón Bolívar, La Pastora, Caracas 1010, Venezuela

Sources: Lynch, J. Simón Bolívar: A Life (2006), Yale University Press; Bolívar, S. El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar (2003, translated Frederick Fornoff)