Diego de Losada founded Caracas on midsummer day 1567
Caracas—officially Santiago de León de Caracas—is Venezuela’s capital and largest city, stretched along the Guaire River near the Caribbean hinterland. Captain Diego de Losada laid its foundations on 25 July 1567; by 1577 it was capital of the Spanish Venezuela Province under Juan de Pimentel.
Caracas lies entirely within a small, irregular valley of the Venezuelan Central Range, cut off from the Caribbean by about 15 kilometres of El Ávila National Park, at altitudes between 870 and 1,043 metres, with the historic centre near 900 metres. The Guaire River crosses the city on its way to the Tuy, and the La Mariposa and Camatagua reservoirs supply its water. The underlying rocks, mostly metamorphic, formed in the Late Cretaceous along with much of the Caribbean.
Those coastal mountains shielded Caracas from most of the pirates who raided Venezuela in the 16th and 17th centuries, but in 1595 about 200 English privateers of the Preston–Somers expedition landed and reached the town. Simón de Bolívar, an ancestor of the Liberator and from 1589 the province's first prosecutor general, petitioned Philip II for a coat of arms, granted in 1591. In 1728 the king chartered the Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas, and cacao grew into the leading trade.
Oil money in the early 20th century swelled the city, and from the 1950s the Gran Caracas metropolitan area took shape amid heavy public building that ran into the early 1970s, producing landmarks such as the University City of Caracas. The cathedral on Bolívar Square marks the historic centre, although some place the heart at Plaza Venezuela in Los Caobos, and the economy today rests mainly on services, banks and malls.
The climate is tropical savanna tempered by altitude, with 900 to 1,300 millimetres of rain a year in the city itself. In December and January fog and sudden night chills down to 8 °C, known locally as the Pacheco, can roll in. Earthquakes have struck repeatedly, including in 1641, and on 24 June 2026 an earthquake doublet caused widespread damage and casualties. Until 2022 the city anthem was Marcha a Caracas, approved in 1984.
Source: Caracas
