Venezuela

From the indigenous peoples of the Orinoco and the coast Columbus reached in 1498, through the Spanish 'little Venice' and the Captaincy General of Caracas, to the cradle of South American independence, the petro-state built on Lake Maracaibo oil, and the Bolivarian Revolution and crisis of the present.

Venezuela's history begins with the indigenous Carib, Arawak and Timoto-Cuica peoples and with Christopher Columbus's third voyage of 1498, when he reached the Gulf of Paria and the Orinoco delta, the only South American mainland he ever touched. The following year navigators of the Ojeda expedition, struck by stilt dwellings on Lake Maracaibo, named the land 'Venezuela', or 'little Venice'; Caracas was founded in 1567 and the Captaincy General of Venezuela created in 1777. Venezuela became the cradle of Spanish American independence: Francisco de Miranda's movement led to the first declaration of independence in the region on 5 July 1811, and Simon Bolivar's campaigns, sealed at the Battle of Carabobo in 1821, freed the country, which formed part of Gran Colombia until it separated in 1830 under Jose Antonio Paez. A century of caudillos and the Federal War gave way to transformation by oil from the 1920s, a democratic era after 1958, and then the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez from 1999 and a deep economic and humanitarian crisis under Nicolas Maduro that, by United Nations estimates, has driven millions abroad.