Bolivia

The Bolívar family traced its origins to the Basque village of Bolibar, in the province of Biscay in northern Spain. In Basque, bolu meant mill and ibar meant valley or river meadow: the name described a place where a mill stood beside moving water. Juan de Bolívar emigrated from Biscay to Venezuela in the early colonial period, carrying the place-name as a hereditary surname. By the time his descendant Simón was born in Caracas on July 24, 1783, the family had been in Venezuela for nearly a century.

Simón Bolívar led campaigns that freed Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru from Spanish rule between 1813 and 1824. When the congress of Upper Peru gathered in Chuquisaca in August 1825 to declare independence, the delegates voted to name the new republic in his honor. Bolívar accepted with misgivings, warning the congress that republics named for living men risked becoming cults of personality rather than nations of law. He proposed Bolivia, appending the Latin suffix -ia to his own name.

Bolívar's larger project was already coming apart when Bolivia was declared. Gran Colombia, the federation he had built across northern South America, collapsed in 1830, the year he died. He left Bogotá in May 1830 intending to sail to Europe and died of tuberculosis on December 17 at a hacienda near Santa Marta, Colombia, aged 47. The republic named for him had been independent for five years; the federation he considered his real achievement had not survived.

Bolivia is one of very few countries in the world named directly for a historical person rather than a geographic feature, people, or river. The others include Washington in the United States and the Philippines, named for Philip II of Spain in 1565. Bolivia has two official capitals, Sucre and La Paz, a distinction that dates to a constitutional crisis in 1899, and it lost its Pacific coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1884. The name Bolívar, rooted in a Basque mill town, sits over all of it.