Venezuela for kids

The capital, Caracas

A beautiful valley, as bountiful as it is merry and as delectable as it is delightful, was how, 300 years ago, Jose Oviedo y Baños described the place where Diego de Losada founded Caracas on July 25, 1567.

Over the years the small town surrounded by the mountains and foothills, which were the homeland of natives like the Mariches, the Tarmas, and the Teques, became the heart of the entire territory that was eventually to be known as Venezuela.

Today with 5 million inhabitants in the small valley where the first houses were put up 426 years ago, Caracas has always been a mute witness to its progress and achievements in the imposing bulk of its guardian, protector and defender El Avila, the eternal symbol of its greatness and misery. The city cannot have better identification than the stark green slopes of the mountain that separates the city from the Caribbean Sea.

At the foot of its steepest slopes, nearly two centuries ago, was born the greatest of its children: Simón Bolívar, The Liberator of America, the father and protector of five countries. Also from its womb sprang Andrés Bello, who in the last century became America’s leading intellectual light, and Francisco de Miranda, a hero of the French Revolution and a precursor of the New World independence.

Men and women from all walks of life, writers and craftsmen, businessmen and artists have enriched Caracas for more than four centuries, giving it that special character of a city constantly changing with the times while preserving its own proud identity.

In Caracas is the seat of power in the country, the center of Venezuelas’s cultural advances, the progress and development of a young nation striving to tame the million square kilometers, which from the Amazons to the Caribbean constitute the inalienable birthright of all its inhabitants.

Caracas today is a cosmopolitan city with its share of problems and achievements, whose shifting patterns have over the past forty years made it a metropolis of tall buildings and verdant residential areas which rank it among one of the major Latin American capitals.