Spain–Venezuela relations
News of Spanish losses in the 1808 Napoleonic Wars soon reached Latin America, but only on 19 April 1810 did the "cabildo" (city council) of Caracas decide to follow the example set by the Spanish provinces two years earlier. On 5 July 1811, seven of the ten provinces of the Captaincy General of Venezuela declared their independence in the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence. The First Republic of Venezuela was lost in 1812 following the 1812 Caracas earthquake and the Battle of La Victoria (1812). Simón Bolívar led an "Admirable Campaign" to retake Venezuela, establishing the Second Republic of Venezuela in 1813, but this did not last long either, falling to a combination of a local uprising and Spanish royalist reconquest.
Second Republic of Venezuela
Historians use the name Third Republic of Venezuela to refer to the period from about 1817 to 1819, when a rump government, organized by Bolívar began functioning in the Venezuelan "Llanos". The year before, various Venezuelan guerilla forces managed to permanently establish themselves in the "Llanos" and captured the city of Angostura, which became their headquarters. This period culminated with the formation of the Congress of Angostura in 1819, which wrote a new constitution for Venezuela, replacing the one from 1811, which in theory, was still valid, although suspended since the collapse of the first republic in 1812. The congress decreed the union of Venezuela with New Granada in a new republic, known as "Gran Colombia", bringing an end to the Third Republic.