June 24, 1821

Second Battle of Carabobo

Battle of Carabobo: Bolívar defeats La Torre

The fight that broke Spain's main field army in Venezuela lasted less than an hour, and much of Bolívar's own army never got into it.

The savanna southwest of Valencia

On the morning of 24 June 1821, Simón Bolívar's republican army confronted Miguel de la Torre's royalist army on the Carabobo savanna, southwest of Valencia.

The republicans numbered approximately 6,000 and outnumbered the royalists by perhaps a thousand, in the estimate of the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture.

Finding the royalist centre and left protected, Bolívar sent José Antonio Páez's First Division through difficult ground to turn the royalist right.

Who paid for the flank

Bolívar's report says the troops crossed a narrow stream under fire and enveloped that flank; his order of battle assigns Páez 1,500 horsemen besides the British Battalion and the Bravos de Apure.

The Bravos de Apure came under intense fire at first. The British Battalion helped sustain the attack and lost heavily among its officers, its commander Thomas Ilderton Ferrier among them.

Republican cavalry then exploited the collapsing royalist flank.

Under an hour, and not the end of the war

Only part of the Tiradores Battalion from Manuel Cedeño's Second Division entered the main action. Cedeño and Ambrosio Plaza were both killed after separately throwing themselves against royalist infantry.

The whole battle took less than an hour. Republican losses are reported at approximately 200 killed and wounded; roughly half the royalist force was captured and the rest fled toward Puerto Cabello, leaving artillery and ammunition behind.

Pedro Camejo died at Carabobo, but his famous farewell dialogue with Páez was popularised in a literary retelling decades later.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

Published troop and casualty totals vary considerably. The fact sheet uses the estimate in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture rather than the larger unsourced ranges repeated online.
Bolívar’s dispatch was written immediately after victory and is indispensable for the republican order of battle, but it is also a victor’s official report.
Detailed casualty totals for the British Battalion and the precise number of royalists reaching Puerto Cabello are inconsistent across later accounts.
Pedro Camejo’s death is accepted, but the polished dying dialogue with Páez is best treated as patriotic memory or legend rather than a verified battlefield quotation.