Caracas

Caracas—officially Santiago de León de Caracas—is Venezuela’s capital and biggest city, forming the core of the Metropolitan Region of Caracas (also called Greater Caracas). It sits in the northern part of the country, along the Guaire River, inside the Caracas Valley within the Venezuelan coastal mountain range. The valley lies near the Caribbean Sea, separated from the coast by a steep mountain range called Cerro El Ávila, which rises 2,200 meters (7,200 feet) high. To the south, additional hills and mountains shape the valley. The metropolitan area is home to an estimated population of over 5 million people.

The historic heart of the city is the Caracas Cathedral, located on Bolívar Square, though some consider Plaza Venezuela in the Los Caobos area to be the center. The city’s businesses include service companies, banks, and shopping malls. Its economy is largely service-based, with some industrial activity in the metropolitan region. The Caracas Stock Exchange and Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) are headquartered here, as is Empresas Polar, Venezuela’s largest private company. Caracas serves as the country’s cultural hub, featuring numerous restaurants, shopping centers, theaters, and museums—such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas. It also boasts some of Latin America’s tallest skyscrapers, including the Parque Central Towers.

Before the city’s founding in 1567, the Caracas valley was inhabited by indigenous peoples. Francisco Fajardo—son of a Spanish captain and a Waikeri cacique, originally from Margarita—began establishing settlements around La Guaira and the Caracas valley between 1555 and 1560. After coastal towns failed, he tried to set up a plantation in the valley in 1562, but it was destroyed by local natives led by Terepaima and Guaicaipuro. His 1560 settlement was called Hato de San Francisco; another attempt in 1561 by Juan Rodríguez de Suárez, named Villa de San Francisco, also fell to the same native groups. The eventual settlers of Caracas came from Coro, the capital of the German Klein-Venedig colony near today’s Colombia–Venezuela border. From the 1540s, that colony had been effectively controlled by Spaniards. Moving east from Coro, groups of Spanish settlers founded inland towns like Barquisimeto and Valencia before reaching the Caracas valley.

On 25 July 1567, Captain Diego de Losada laid the foundations of Santiago de León de Caracas. He had been tasked with capturing the valley and succeeded by splitting the natives into smaller groups and defeating them one by one. Among the new settlements, Caracas was the closest to the coast. The Spanish colonists kept a native workforce, enabling a trade network between Caracas, Venezuela’s interior, and Margarita. Inland towns traded cotton and beeswax, while Margarita was rich in pearls. The Caracas valley offered good conditions for both agriculture and arable farming, supporting this commerce. Still, the town’s population was initially sparse, enough only for a few farms.

In 1577, Caracas became the capital of the Spanish Empire’s Venezuela Province under Governor Juan de Pimentel (1576–1583). In the 1580s, residents began selling food by ship to Spanish soldiers stationed in Cartagena, who docked there to load goods from other parts of South America. Wheat was growing expensive in the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish profited by buying it from Caracas farmers, cementing the city in the empire’s trade circuit.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Venezuela’s coast was frequently raided by pirates. The coastal mountains of the Central Range shielded Caracas from such attacks better than other Caribbean settlements, but in 1595 the Preston–Somers expedition landed. About 200 English privateers, including George Somers and Amyas Preston, crossed the mountains through a little-used pass while the town’s defenders guarded the more common route. Meeting little resistance, the invaders sacked and burned the town after a failed ransom negotiation. Caracas rebuilt using wheat profits and “a lot of sacrifice.” In the 1620s, farmers discovered that cacao beans could be sold—first to native people of Mexico—and trade quickly spread across the Caribbean. The city grew important in the Viceroyalty of New Spain and shifted from largely native slave labor to African slaves, becoming one of the first Spanish colonies to enter the slave trade. The city thrived on cacao and slave labor until the 1650s, when an alhorra blight, the Mexican Inquisition targeting many Portuguese traders, and increased cacao production in Guayaquil hurt the market. This, along with the destructive 1641 earthquake, sent the city into decline. Caraqueños likely began illegally trading with the Dutch Empire, to whom they later showed sympathy; by the 1670s, Caracas had a trading route through Curaçao.

In 1728, the king founded the Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas, boosting the cacao business. In 1739, Caracas became one of three provinces of Nueva Granada, corresponding to Venezuela. Over the next three decades, the Viceroyalty was split and reorganized, with Caracas province becoming the Venezuela province. Luis de Unzaga created the Captaincy General of Venezuela in the summer of 1777, with Caracas as its capital. Venezuela then attempted independence, first with the 1797 Gual and España conspiracy based in Caracas, and later with the successful 1811 Venezuelan independence movement.