La Guaira, the port of Caracas

Where is La Guaira, and why was it the port of Caracas?

Caracas was founded in 1567 in a high valley, cut off from the sea by a steep range of mountains. In 1580 La Guaira, on the shore just below, was chosen as the landing place for goods bound for Caracas. Rules for the port followed in 1589, the year historians usually give for its start as Venezuela’s main port.

It was never a comfortable harbour. La Guaira had no sheltered bay, only an open anchorage, called a roadstead, where wind, swell and currents made ships anchor well offshore and loading slow and awkward. Even in the 1730s, company captains reckoned a ship could safely stay only about eight days. Puerto Cabello, further west, had a better harbour, but La Guaira was closest to the capital.

How did goods travel between La Guaira and Caracas?

In 1589 the governor, Diego de Osorio, ordered a road built over the mountains. It followed an older Indigenous trail and was finished in 1603. Now called the Camino de los Españoles, the Spaniards’ Road, it climbed to about 1,800 metres before dropping into the valley of Caracas.

For more than two hundred years this was the only proper road between the capital and the sea. Mules carried sacks of cacao down to the port and brought cloth, tools and other goods back up. A cart road came only in 1845 and a railway in 1883. A small fort, El Salto, guarded the road by about 1650; most of the other forts along it were built around 1770.

What did La Guaira trade around 1715?

La Guaira’s fortune was cacao, the bean chocolate is made from. In the 1620s Caracas planters found they could sell it in Mexico, and from the 1670s to the 1740s exports grew almost every year. Most legal cargoes crossed the Caribbean to Veracruz. Tobacco and hides also went out, and ships brought back cloth, iron goods, spirits and flour.

The cacao groves in the valleys around Caracas depended on enslaved Africans. Historian Robert Ferry shows that Caracas came to rely on enslaved workers earlier than any other Spanish colony in the 1600s, and that people kept being brought in steadily until the late 1730s. Spain did not run this trade itself: it sold a foreign company the right to bring enslaved people to its colonies, through a contract called the asiento. While a French company held it, from 1701, its slave ships called at La Guaira.

Trade with Spain itself was thin: before 1728, usually about one ship a year. The gap was filled by smugglers. Small Dutch boats from Curaçao, only a short sail away, traded along the coast for cacao and tobacco, which went on to Amsterdam. Spain sometimes even bought Venezuelan cacao back from Dutch merchants.

Who attacked La Guaira?

La Guaira’s forts and walls began in the late 1500s, but they did not always hold. In 1595 English raiders under Amyas Preston and George Somers took the fort near the port. Then, guided by an Indigenous man, they climbed a hidden track over the mountains while Spanish troops waited on the main road, and captured, sacked and burned Caracas.

In 1680 Michel de Grammont, a French buccaneer from Hispaniola, made a surprise night attack with a small party. He seized the port and its governor, but when troops marched down from Caracas he had to fight his way back to his ships, badly wounded, with little loot.

Long after the game’s years, in 1743, a large British squadron under Charles Knowles attacked La Guaira and was beaten off with heavy losses.

What was the Caracas Company?

In 1728 King Philip V gave a group of Basque merchants from Gipuzkoa, in northern Spain, the sole right to trade between Spain and Venezuela. Their Royal Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas was meant to carry Venezuelan cacao to Spain and to put an end to Dutch smuggling, using its own armed coastguard ships, called guardacostas.

The first company ships left the Basque port of Pasajes in July 1730 and met a hostile welcome from local planters. The company turned La Guaira from a sleepy port into a busy one, and set up a large trading house there, with warehouses on the ground floor. In 1749 a planter named Juan Francisco de León led a rebellion against it. The company lasted until 1785.

Did people escaping slavery on Curaçao find freedom here?

Some did. Between 1680 and 1770 the Spanish crown issued at least a dozen orders offering freedom to enslaved people who fled from Protestant colonies and asked to become Catholic. Historian Linda Rupert calls Venezuela the largest and best-recorded case: hundreds of Afro-Curaçaoans crossed the strait in canoes and small boats during the 1700s. Many landed on the coast near Coro, the part of Venezuela closest to Curaçao, well to the west of La Guaira. In 1703 a group of 23 arrived there, and some fugitives were later sent on to Caracas.

Freedom was never automatic. One group of 31 runaways caught on the coast early in the 1700s was claimed by Venezuelan owners and by the French asiento company. Captains of Caracas’s free Black militia argued in court that they should live as free subjects of the king, yet they waited years in legal limbo.

One of those captains, Juan del Rosario Blanco, asked the king in 1715 for permission to found a town for free Black people and refugees. In 1721 the town of Curiepe was founded east of La Guaira, its settlers promising to guard the coast against smugglers. In 1729 Juana Isabel Curazao escaped from Curaçao, won her freedom and received land there.

What is left of colonial La Guaira today?

The old centre, squeezed between mountains and sea, still has the cathedral of San Pedro Apóstol and the Caracas Company’s trading house, the Casa Guipuzcoana, restored in 1973. Venezuela listed the historic centre as a national landmark in 1969, and it is on Venezuela’s list of possible World Heritage Sites. An earthquake in 1812 and mudslides in 1999 damaged many old houses. Parts of the Spaniards’ Road and its forts survive in the mountains above.