Oil made Venezuela’s strait city rich
Maracaibo, Zulia’s capital on the strait linking Lake Maracaibo to the Gulf of Venezuela, ranks as the country’s second-largest city. Petroleum along the lake shores made it western Venezuela’s economic engine and earned the boast “First City of Venezuela” for early public-service firsts.
Arawakan and Kalina peoples lived here before Spanish attempts. Ambrosio Ehinger failed in 1529; Alonso Pacheco failed in 1569; lasting foundation came later in the 1570s after those false starts.
La Chinita International Airport serves the city, and the General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge ties it to the rest of the country. One legend derives the name from a young chief, Mara, whose fall in battle against the Spanish was mourned with shouts of Mara cayó, Mara fell; another theory points to an Indigenous term said to mean place where serpents abound. The Wayuu call it Marakaaya.
The Añu people built rows of stilt houses on the lake's northern shore, and Europeans first arrived in 1499. Ehinger's 1529 attempt came during the period when Emperor Charles I granted Venezuela to the Welser banking family of Augsburg; Nikolaus Federmann moved the settlers away in 1535. Pacheco's settlement was abandoned in 1573 under Indigenous attack, and in 1574 Pedro Maldonado re-founded it as Nueva Zamora de la Laguna de Maracaibo, after the hometown of Governor Diego de Mazariegos.
Pirates repeatedly sacked it: Henrik de Gerard in 1614, William Jackson in 1642, François l'Olonnais with 600 men in 1667, Henry Morgan in March 1669, and Michel de Grammont with 700 men in June 1678. The province stayed loyal to Spain in 1810, and royalist rule ended with the Battle of Lake Maracaibo on 24 July 1823. Reachable mostly by boat for nearly 380 years, the city traded more with the Caribbean than with Caracas and developed a strong regional identity. In January 1903 the German gunboat SMS Panther traded fire with Fort San Carlos for 30 minutes before withdrawing.
Source: Maracaibo
