{
  "id": "semanario-del-nuevo-reino-de-granada",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Santa Fé de Bogotá, 1808-1810) and its thirty-three subscribers",
  "summary": "A weekly printed at Santa Fé de Bogotá from 1808 under Francisco José de Caldas, carrying observatory weather tables, a memoir on snakes and antivenom by the crown's zoologist, quina export figures, the trade balances of Cartagena and Veracruz, a provincial statistical survey of Antioquia and a published count of the capital's smallpox vaccinations. It also printed the list of its own subscribers, headed by the viceroy and running to thirty-three entries.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "colombia",
    "new-granada",
    "printing",
    "books",
    "science",
    "meteorology",
    "enlightenment",
    "public-health",
    "trade",
    "eighteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "francisco-jose-de-caldas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mercurio-peruano-1791"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mutis-botanical-expedition"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alzate-gacetas-de-literatura-1788"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "keeping-the-vaccine-alive-in-spanish-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quina-cascarilla-del-peru"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diario-de-mexico-1805"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "papel-periodico-de-la-havana-1790"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "observatorio-astronomico-de-santafe-de-bogota"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mutis-arcano-de-la-quina-1828"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-sociedad-economica-de-la-habana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diario-de-mexico-1806"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "caldas-nivelaciones-barometrico-botanicas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "lozano-memoria-sobre-las-serpientes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sociedad-patriotica-de-amigos-del-pais-de-quito"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada?",
    "Did colonial Bogotá have a scientific journal?",
    "How many subscribers did the Semanario have?",
    "What did the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada publish?",
    "Who wrote for the Semanario of Bogotá?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "Two titles have to be kept apart. The paper printed at Santa Fé from 1808 is called, in its own running heads and in its index, the \"Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada\"; the volume opened for this object is the later collection whose title page reads \"SEMANARIO DE LA NUEVA GRANADA. MISCELANEA DE CIENCIAS, LITERATURA, ARTES E INDUSTRIA. Publicada por una sociedad de patriotas Granadinos, bajo la direccion de FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE CALDAS. Nueva Edicion\", Paris, Lasserre, 1849. The republished title drops the kingdom and keeps the nation. Everything below is what that volume prints.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The contents for 1808, as the index lists them, are a working scientific and economic review rather than a literary miscellany: the state of the viceroyalty's geography; meteorological observations for each month from January to June 1808 made at the Bogotá observatory, with notes explaining the tables; a description of that observatory; a letter on the influence of climate by Diego Martin Tanco; a discourse on education by Caldas; the observation of the total lunar eclipse of 9 May 1808; the long memoir \"Del influjo del clima sobre los seres organizados\" by Caldas; and a table for the article on atmospheric pressure.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Its contributors were a network of creole officials, priests and lawyers writing on what their provinces produced. The index names Jorge Tadeo Lozano Maldonado de Mendoza, \"individuo de la real Expedicion Botánica de Santa Fé de Bogotá, y encargado, con real aprobacion, de su parte zoológica\", on the snakes of the kingdom and the remedies for their bites; Eloy de Valenzuela, parish priest of Bucaramanga, on a grass useful for artificial pasture, on the caña solera and on the uses of honey; José Manuel Restrepo, lawyer of the audiencia, on the geography, productions, industry and population of the province of Antioquia, with a table of its longitudes, latitudes, barometric heights and mean temperatures on Réaumur's scale; and José Manuel Campos y Coto, priest of Prado, on the river of Prado.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "It printed commercial and fiscal numbers as a matter of course: a summary of the quina extracted from the port of Cartagena for other parts of America and for Europe over the previous six years, sent in by Valenzuela; the trade balance of Cartagena; and the trade balance of Veracruz, contributed by Ignacio Cavero. A paper published in Bogotá was reporting the customs figures of a Mexican port to its readers.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Public health was part of the remit, and page 156 carries the proof: a \"Noticia del número de personas que se han vacunado en esta capital desde 1 de Marzo de 1805, en que por efecto de la bondad del Soberano se dió principio á las primeras vacunaciones, hasta 29 de mayo de 1808, en que se continúan, observándose en el flúido la misma frescura, vigor y actividad que manifestó entonces\", published by Miguel de Pombo, lawyer of the audiencia and secretary of the Junta principal de Vacuna, with a short eulogy of Jenner. Its table gives 390 vaccinated between 1 March 1805 and 1 March 1806, 542 to 5 March 1807, 600 to 29 May 1808, and a \"Suma total en 3 años\" of 1532.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The readership is the fact that makes this object worth writing, because the paper published it against itself. Page 545 heads a list \"Lista de los que únicos suscritores al Semanario del N. R. de Granada, hasta el último de enero de 1810\" - the only subscribers. It opens with \"Excmo. Sr. D. Antonio Amar y Borbon, virey del Reino. Santa Fé\", and runs across pages 545 and 546 to thirty-three entries in all, of which this run counted fifteen on the first page and eighteen on the second. Confidence sits at 0.85 because the count is this run's own count off two page scans.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Where those subscribers were is as telling as how few. Beside the viceroy and a dozen names at Santa Fé, the list reaches Tunja, Girón, Pore, Santa Rosa, Chire, Sapatoca, Ibagué, Purificacion, Popayan, San Bartolomé, Peñas, Guaduas and Cartagena; the Dominican provincial took two copies; the Real Consulado of Cartagena took four; and two copies went to Veracruz. A scientific weekly of the Andes had institutional subscribers in a Mexican port and individual ones in parishes of the eastern plains.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The series was fragile and says so. The observatory tables that began in 1808 were suspended: \"Varias causas nos obligaron á suspender las tablas meteorológicas que comenzaron á aparecer en 1808 en nuestro Semanario\", the editor writes on page 544, before presenting them again reduced not to the civil month but to the revolution of the moon, with a column added for Saussure's hair hygrometer. The index carries a \"Prospecto del Semanario para el año 1809\" and then a section headed \"Año de 1810. Continuacion del Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada\"; the material printed in this volume ends with 1810, the year in which the viceroyalty broke apart.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "What the paper was for is stated in Caldas's opening pages and it is a colonial argument, not an independence one: the Semanario is \"consagrado principalmente á la felicidad de esta Colonia\", it will measure \"la distancia á que nos hallamos de la prosperidad\", and if it censures established usages \"no es la maledicencia, no es la crítica amarga la que nos mueve; es, sí, el amor que profesamos al pais en que hemos visto la luz\". The men who wrote it would divide over independence within two years, and the editor of 1849 republished them as patriots; the 1808 text does not say that.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The limits of this object. It rests on a single reprint volume of 1849, whose editor is an interested party, and no colonial copy of the Semanario and no modern study of it could be opened from the machine that wrote this; the original numbers may differ from what Paris printed. The pages actually read were the title leaf, page X of the editor's advertencia, pages 1 and 2, 156, 544, 545 and 546, and the index leaves 569, 570 and 572. Contents named from the index are named as index entries, not as pages read.",
      "sources": [
        "caldas-semanario-nueva-granada-1849"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Where the Semanario is mentioned in English at all it is as background to Colombian independence, and no page ever says what was in it. This object reads the volume: the observatory tables for six months of 1808, the crown zoologist on snakebite remedies, a priest of Bucaramanga on pasture grass and honey, the quina shipped out of Cartagena, the customs balance of Veracruz reprinted in Bogotá, a statistical survey of Antioquia with barometric heights, and a published count of 1532 vaccinations in the capital in three years with a eulogy of Jenner by the secretary of its vaccine board. Against all that it sets the paper's own subscriber list of January 1810, which calls its subscribers the only ones it has, is headed by the viceroy, and comes to thirty-three entries. That number, printed by the paper itself, is the honest measure of an enlightenment that existed and was very thin.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-12",
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  "jsonld": {
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    "name": "The Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Santa Fé de Bogotá, 1808-1810) and its thirty-three subscribers",
    "description": "A weekly printed at Santa Fé de Bogotá from 1808 under Francisco José de Caldas, carrying observatory weather tables, a memoir on snakes and antivenom by the crown's zoologist, quina export figures, the trade balances of Cartagena and Veracruz, a provincial statistical survey of Antioquia and a published count of the capital's smallpox vaccinations. It also printed the list of its own subscribers, headed by the viceroy and running to thirty-three entries.",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-12",
    "citation": [
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        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Semanario de la Nueva Granada: miscelanea de ciencias, literatura, artes e industria, publicada por una sociedad de patriotas Granadinos, bajo la direccion de Francisco Jose de Caldas",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=K3bUuNIfcmgC&pg=PA1"
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Santa Fé de Bogotá, 1808-1810) and its thirty-three subscribers"
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}