Venezuela's Valencia claims an eight-year head start on Caracas
Capital of Carabobo State and Venezuela's third-largest city, Valencia anchors a metro of about 4.5 million with Maracay—second only to Caracas, some 172 kilometres away. Captain Alonso Díaz Moreno founded it on 25 March 1555, eight years before Caracas, under a long Marian dedication that locals still recite with pride.
People were hunting and foraging around the Lake Valencia basin by the fourth millennium BC, perhaps already tending simple crops. Between AD 200 and 1000 a sizeable village took shape near the shore, and from about 1000 newcomers from the Orinoco, probably travelling up the Pao River, merged with the locals to form what archaeologists call the Valencioide culture. These mostly Arawak communities fished, hunted, grew maize and cotton, and raised their houses on man-made mounds because the lake regularly flooded the valleys. What survives from them is chiefly pottery.
The Spanish town was the first in north-central Venezuela, and its full name, Our Lady of the Assumption of New Valencia of the King, honoured Valencia de Don Juan in León. Encomiendas handed the native population to settlers, who pushed them off the best land but also married into their families. The rogue conquistador Lope de Aguirre rode in during 1561, and in 1677 French pirates burned the town hall, destroying irreplaceable records of early Venezuela. Alexander von Humboldt later counted roughly 6,000 to 7,000 residents.
On 24 June 1821 the Battle of Carabobo, fought just outside town, secured Venezuelan independence from Spain. Valencia served as national capital in 1830 after the break from Gran Colombia and again in 1858 after the March Revolution. Its university, now the University of Carabobo, opened on 15 November 1892, and the Municipal Theatre, modelled on French playhouses, was finished in 1895.
It was still a small city when the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez died in 1935; oil money and industry then drew waves of European and later Latin American immigrants. Today it spreads across five municipalities at about 500 metres, beside Venezuela's second-largest lake. About 59% of its voters rejected Hugo Chávez's constitutional reform, one of the strongest no votes in the country. Its Plaza Monumental is said to be the world's second-largest bullring.
Source: Valencia, Venezuela
