La Pola: The Seamstress Who Spied on an Empire
Colombia put her face on its money and its monuments. It remembers how she died at twenty-two — and forgets almost everything about how she lived.
By Laura Vanessa Medina · 8 min read
In Colombia, everyone knows the name. Policarpa Salavarrieta has been on banknotes, on coins, on monuments, in every schoolbook. We call her La Pola, as though she were an old friend.
And yet what most of us actually remember is a single fact: that she was a heroine, and that she was shot.
Her story is so much larger than her death.
Before she became a national symbol, Policarpa made a series of dangerous choices in a world where women were expected to have no public life at all. She commanded no army. She held no office. Her power lay in her intelligence, in what she overheard, and in her ability to walk through rooms where no soldier would ever imagine an enemy standing.
A young woman in a country that was not yet free
She was born around 1795 in Guaduas, a small town between the Magdalena River and Bogotá, in a territory that was not yet Colombia — it was the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and it belonged to Spain.
Here is the first thing worth knowing about her, and it says everything about how women are recorded: we do not know her legal name. Her birth certificate was never found. Her father called her Apolonia in his will. Her brother Bibiano called her Policarpa. A false passport issued in 1817 named her Gregoria Apolinaria. Her comrades simply said La Pola.
The most famous woman in Colombian independence, and history cannot tell us with certainty what her mother called her.
When she was still a child, a smallpox epidemic killed her parents and two of her siblings. The family scattered. Policarpa returned to Guaduas with relatives, and there she learned the trade that would eventually make her useful to a revolution: she became a seamstress.
She grew up in a territory at war with itself. Part of the population wanted independence; part remained loyal to the Spanish Crown. After several failed rebellions, the Spanish army retook control and began hunting down anyone who had supported the other side.
That was when Policarpa decided to involve herself.
When sewing becomes an act of resistance
In 1817 she arrived in Bogotá carrying forged papers, with her brother Bibiano. The city was the stronghold of Spanish authority. Anyone accused of aiding the independence movement could be imprisoned or sentenced to death.
She took a room in the house of Andrea Ricaurte y Lozano — a woman whose home doubled as a base for a network of female spies — ostensibly as a servant. And she went to work as a seamstress in the households of women connected to the Spanish government.
Think about what that access meant. Her trade let her walk into the private homes of the enemy and stay there for hours, invisible, doing something so ordinary that nobody thought to lower their voice. She listened. She learned the numbers of soldiers, their movements, where the weapons were kept, what the authorities were planning.
But she did far more than listen. She carried messages. She helped obtain supplies. She recruited young men into the patriot forces. She was part of a clandestine network working to hollow out Spanish control from inside the city.
Sewing opened the door. It was never the whole of the work.
What Policarpa understood — and used — is that an occupation dismissed as ordinary and feminine could be turned into a weapon. The authorities would have suspected a soldier. They did not suspect a young woman carrying fabric and needles.
They would have suspected a soldier. They did not suspect a young woman carrying fabric and needles.
The courage to choose danger
Women who took part in the independence movements of the Americas are usually described in history books as helpers to the great men. Wives. Nurses. Messengers. As though what they did were secondary, a supporting role in someone else’s story.
In fact, carrying information in wartime was as dangerous as carrying a rifle. One intercepted letter was a death sentence. Policarpa knew exactly what she was risking, and she kept working.
Her youth should not be mistaken for naïveté. She used forged documents. She built relationships of trust with people who could have destroyed her. She learned to move through an enemy-held city without being caught. She did all of this in her early twenties, in a society that expected women to stay far away from anything political.
It ended the way these things end. Her contacts were captured — one of them, Alejo Sabaraín, was taken while trying to escape, carrying a list of royalists and patriots that Policarpa had given him. The papers led the authorities straight to her. She and Bibiano were arrested at Andrea Ricaurte’s house and tried by a military council.
The price of defying power
She was sentenced to death and shot by firing squad in Bogotá’s main square on the morning of 14 November 1817. She was twenty-two.
The words attributed to her that morning have become famous in Colombia: “Indolent people! How different your fate would be today if you knew the price of liberty! See that, though a woman and young, I have more than enough courage to endure this death and a thousand more.”
Some accounts add another detail: ordered to turn her back to the firing squad, as traitors were required to do, she refused — and knelt facing them instead.
Not every one of these accounts can be verified, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Her courage doesn’t need invented words. The choices she made while she was alive speak louder than any sentence written afterwards.
Her execution was meant as a warning to anyone supporting independence. It achieved the opposite. The young woman the Spanish government tried to silence has been remembered for more than two centuries — and Colombia now marks the anniversary of her death as the Day of the Colombian Woman.
She was one of many. At least 150 women, across every class and ethnicity, were exiled or executed in those years for the cause of independence. Most of their names are gone.
The execution was meant as a warning. Instead it made her permanent.
What her story means to me
What strikes me about La Pola is how completely you can know a woman’s name and still know nothing about her.
As a Colombian, I’m proud that a young woman had the nerve to stand against something that enormous. But I also find myself wondering how many women helped build our countries only to be reduced to an image, a date, a single sentence in a textbook.
Remembering Policarpa properly means more than admiring her sacrifice. It means recognising that a young woman, in an era designed to keep her far from any political decision, understood that she could shape the future of her country anyway. Her story reminds me that we do not need an official position to defend what we believe in.
Remember how she lived
We can forget a woman while repeating her name. We forget her when we know only how she died and overlook her intelligence, her nerve, her talent for organising, her decision to take an active part in what her country would become.
La Pola did not simply appear one morning in front of a firing squad. Before that morning she was an orphaned girl, a worker, a seamstress, and a woman with political convictions who understood that she did not need permission to enter history.
More than two hundred years later, her life is a reminder that courage does not always come in uniform, and that small actions can stand against enormous powers. Policarpa used what she had, accepted what it would cost, and refused to stay on the sidelines.
We should not remember her only for the way she was killed.
We should remember her for the way she chose to live: as a young woman capable of defying an empire.
Laura Vanessa Medina is a Colombian writer covering fashion and whatever she can’t stop thinking about for Shansi.
Sources: Banco de la República, Banrepcultural Encyclopedia; National Museum of Colombia; Señal Colombia; contemporary accounts of the trial and execution of November 1817.
