Winding a way to Caracas.

• Author: Robinson, Richard
• Position: Venezuela

In the wild, high country between Caracas and the sea, the remnants of a finely paved road lie beneath the moss and detritus of the forest floor, untrodden but for the occasional farmer or determined hiker. To follow this old road is to trace a path through time and space, cutting a cross section through the most colorful and turbulent years of Venezuelan history.

The prosaically named Calle 10 Norte runs straight uphill from the church at La Pastora, a Caracas neighborhood where traces of colonial origins stubbornly persist. Local people still remember when the road was called Calle Real, and trams clattered between rows of stuccoed houses to the cramped, bustling crossroads at the top of the hill, still known as La Puerta de Caracas, the gateway to the city.

Venezuela's most historically significant road, the Camino Real de los Espanoles is remarkable in many ways. Beginning as a simple mule trail, it served the city as practically its only link with the outside world for nearly three centuries. It crossed the immense natural barrier of the Sierra del Avila and resisted the onset of the modern age to the very end; it had no rival until the belated completion of the first carriage road in 1845. Perhaps its most unusual achievement is that it has survived, though ravaged by time, to the present day.

Never systematically planned and executed, the Camino Real simply emerged from the skein of mountain paths used by the Caracas Indians before the arrival of the Spaniards. It took shape through the needs of the developing colonial city, its way and form dictated by the abrupt lay of the land and the tumultuous events of its time.

The coastal range was at once a drawback and an asset to the new city of Santiago de Leon de Caracas, founded in 1567. An unnamed Spanish soldier, when quizzed "Why they had not walled the city, being so fair a thing as it was" replied to an English invader that he "thought it be stronger than any city in the world, meaning, by those huge and high mountains which the enemy must pass over before he can approach it."

Indeed, the Avila range rises sharply from the Caribbean coast to more than 8,500 feet in a series of peaks and high passes. The summit, parallel to the shore and only five miles inland, gives a strong impression of impregnability and leaves only the narrowest of shelves for La Guaira and other coastal settlements. The once-green and pleasant valley of Caracas lies in an elevated fold behind this rugged product of tectonic collision, at 3,150 feet above sea level.

Early Spanish settlers on the coast of Venezuela were disappointed by the lack of significant gold deposits and turned to agriculture in the second phase of occupation; it was in this period that the towns of Valencia, Barquisimeto, and Caracas were founded, the latter becoming the capital of the Spanish province of Venezuela when it was adopted as the residence of the governor, Juan de Pimentel, in 1576. The climate and soils of the valley of Caracas favored cattle rearing and agriculture for both subsistence and export, and these activities fueled the growth of the still-small town through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning in 1607 cacao -- a key product to the economy of the province -- was exported, providing the basis for the future...