Following key military victories in the early 1820s, Simón Bolívar and many other founding fathers embarked on a nation-building process that had at its heart the goal of establishing a republic that could not only maintain its independence but also be welcome into the Euro-Atlantic community of nations. Doing so, or creating what I call an Andean-Atlantic nation, required erasing the strong links to the Caribbean explored in the previous chapters and replacing them with stronger links to Europe and the United States. To this aim, it was necessary to decaribbeanize the nascent republic. An analysis of these two complementary processes demonstrates that the fact that Colombia ended up becoming an Andean-Atlantic nation does not unequivocally indicate that there were no alternatives. A Caribbean counternarrative, though ultimately defeated, was one of these alternatives. Focusing on two generations of enlightened nation makers—the enlightened creoles and their successors, the politician-geographers—this chapter explains why the transimperial Greater Caribbean did not find its way into Colombia’s nation-making narrative. Enlightened creoles and politician-geographers made possible the decaribbeanization of the new republic and the creation of an Andean-Atlantic nation. Their efforts did not go unchallenged. From the Caribbean coast, a Caribbean counternarrative evolved as potential, though ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to the Andean-Atlantic republic. Both the Andean-Atlantic republican project and the Caribbean counternarrative illustrate key elements of nation makers’ geopolitical imagination, of the way in which they interpreted their present and envisioned the future of the nation they sought to construct.