Money is in botany, as in all things, the great spring. The quinine trade in the formation of Francisco Antonio Zea (1785-1795).

Abstract

The article shows how foreign travelers in Colombia, in their travel stories, saw religion, religiosity, and the Church, in times of Independence. Colombia is understood as it was understood from 1819 to 1830, that is, the union of current Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. We defend the hypothesis that the travel stories reveal a complex scenario that was not reduced to the view that religion, religiosity, and church were immutable, nor that everything was chaotic due to the war and the breakdown of the colonial order. The visions in the travel stories range from the most critical, paradoxically elaborated by Catholics, to the most diplomatic, elaborated by Protestants who sought to establish relationships of various kinds with the emerging country. Both visions, reflected in the travel stories, are compared with other sources and specialized literature to elaborate a more complex explanation of how the three main themes of the article were viewed by foreign travelers.