María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa
wife of Simón Bolívar
María Teresa Josefa Antonia Joaquina Rodríguez del Toro Alayza (15 October 1781 – 22 January 1803), was the Spanish-born wife of Simón Bolívar. After only two years of engagement and eight months of marriage, she died after contracting yellow fever at 21 years of age. Bolívar swore and kept his promise to never remarry. According to historians, and to Bolívar himself, her death was a turning point in his life that put him in the path to become the liberator of six Hispanic American nations and the forefather of the Hispanic American integration process.
Biography
María Teresa was the only daughter of Bernardo Rodríguez del Toro y Ascanio, born in Caracas, Venezuela in the heart of a family with origins in Teror, Canary Islands, and Benita de Alayza Medrano, from Valladolid, Spain. She was born in Madrid on 15 October 1781, during the reign of Charles III. María Teresa was deeply linked to Caraquenian society. Her father was the son of the second Marquess del Toro, Francisco Rodríguez del Toro e Isturiz (Governor and Captain General of the Province of Venezuela), and brother of the third Marquess, Sebastián Rodríguez del Toro y Ascanio (Major of Caracas), whose title was inherited by María Teresa's first cousin Francisco Rodríguez del Toro (who would become the first Commander in Chief of Venezuela's independence army). By her mother's side, María Teresa was a niece of the Marquess of Inicio and Count of Rebolledo. Upon her mother's death, María Teresa, though of a young age, took care of her brothers and helped her father and her cousin, Pedro Rodríguez del Toro, in matters related to the administration of goods and haciendas. Various studies and biographies gloss the recreation of the myth of María Teresa:
To date no portraits of her have appeared, and consequently her few images are entirely the figment of the artists' imagination, who were apparently unaware of the general description of her physical appearance that implied a strong resemblance to her light-eyed first cousin, usually blue or greenish.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6004714. VIAF identifies the subject as 53135110. The Library of Congress control number is n85230635. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1781 and 1803.
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This entry incorporates text from “María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaysa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.