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Caracas
Venezuela's capital in a narrow mountain valley
Squeezed into a long, narrow valley behind a coastal mountain wall, Caracas is a dense, vertical capital where modern towers and sprawling hillside barrios crowd every available slope. Venezuela's political and cultural heart, the city of roughly three million in its core was built on twentieth-century oil wealth that raised highways, universities, and ambitious modernist architecture. Today it is a place of striking contrasts and hardship, its faded affluence shadowed by years of economic crisis, yet still pulsing with Caribbean energy beneath the green ridge of the Avila.
The city lies about 900 metres up in a valley of the Cordillera de la Costa, separated from the Caribbean by the steep forested massif of El Avila, now a national park that rises directly above downtown. A coastal road and tunnels link the city to its port and airport on the shore below. The elevation tempers the tropical heat into a mild, spring-like climate, while the constraining ridges have forced the metropolis to grow ever upward and into the hills, packing density onto difficult terrain.
Diego de Losada founded Santiago de Leon de Caracas in 1567, and the city became the birthplace of Simon Bolivar, the liberator whose campaigns freed much of South America from Spanish rule. Oil transformed it in the twentieth century from a provincial town into a booming modern capital. The petroleum era left a legacy of grand infrastructure and the sprawling university city, but the economic collapse of recent years has reshaped daily life, even as Caracas remains the seat of Venezuela's government and national identity.