After the fall of the viceregal government in 1810, New Granada's provinces enjoyed only a brief freedom. Obsessed by local affairs, the provinces failed to unite against a resurgent Spanish monarchy, and after General Morillo's expeditionary army landed at Santa Marta in 1815 the forces of metropolitan counterrevolution swiftly reconquered New Granada for Spain. Permanent reconstruction of the colonial order was more difficult. If weariness with civil conflict and regional disunion facilitated Spanish reconquest in 1815–16, then the savage repression that followed helped rekindle opposition to the renascent colonial regime.

In some regions, a popular resistance rooted in the freedom enjoyed between 1810 and 1815 mounted an anti-Spanish insurgency that, if it could not create a nation, kept alive the idea of independence and prepared a way for liberation. In 1819, Bolívar brought his irregular army across the Andes from the Venezuelan plains and, by defeating Spanish forces at the Battle of Boyacá, began the final liberation of the country from Spanish rule. At this point, New Granada was brought under republican government, but subsumed, together with Venezuela and Ecuador, within the great tripartite state known to historians as Gran Colombia. This arrangement endured until 1830 when, after a succession of local revolts against the Bolivarian government, Venezuela and Ecuador seceded from the union and became separate republics.