Shifting sands & colonial continuity.

• Author: Malatesta, Parisina
• Position: Coro, Venezuela

Coro, a former Spanish capital on Venezuela's northwestern coast, endures wind and desert to preserve a unique architectural legacy

The Caquetios, a Caribbean Indian tribe who inherited Venezuela's parched western coast from the Arawaks, aptly named the region Coro, their predecessors' word for wind. And not just any wind, but one "that blows constantly," according to Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri, "bending the trees, tippling the sea, grooving fine prints along the slopes of the dunes, slipping through the open streets and holding the flying turkey vultures motionless in space."

Situated midway between the Paraguana Peninsula and the town of Coro, on the slender isthmus that joins that peninsula to the mainland, are the strange formations known as the Coro Dunes, a national park since 1974. Their beauty is the result of the steady, shifting of wind-swept dunes and of hypnotic patterns created by shadows on the sand - in the words of the popular waltz by Rafael Sanchez Lopez - or by the capricious shapes of a tree trunk and a scattering of petrified seashells.

Such an imposing desert, evoking the great sand sweeps of Africa and Asia, is certainly an unusual feature in the otherwise lush Caribbean. But Coro is surprising for another reason: It is a living monument to Spanish colonial design. The town's architectural unity led the government to declare it a National Monument in 1957; in 1993 UNESCO designated Coro and its port, La Vela, a World Heritage Site.

Coastal Venezuela had been explored, if not settled, by the 1520s, its riches - in gold, pearls, tropical hardwoods, not to mention slaves - were well known and comparatively accessible. The traditional founding of Coro is attributed to Juan de Ampies, who, in 1527, after having colonized the nearby islands of Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire, established Coro, a foothold on the mainland, and made it the province's first capital. It is said that Coro was also the site of one of the first, and friendly, encounters between Indian and Spanish, the feared Caquetio chief Manaure and Ampies.

As one might guess, this initial idyll did not last. Within two years, Ampies, who had barely settled in, was forced to relinquish authority to a group of German bankers, the Welsers, who earlier had been granted a lease on western Venezuela by Charles V. In reality, their agent, Ambrose Alfinger, who became the region's first governor, was the founder of Coro. Over the next seventeen years, the Welsers...