UN General Assembly
1963

4. The name Venezuela evokes for me today the beautiful picture of its countryside, the picture of the Llanos, that immense inland area which stretches out majestically like a Venezuelan Castile. It brings to mind Lake Maracaibo, at the edge of the Caribbean Sea, where Alonso de Ojeda baptized Venezuela; the profile of the gigantic Andes, the spinal column of America, a road familiar to Spaniards in former times; and finally the mighty Orinoco, with its immense volume of water, opening up at its delta, as Columbus saw it, into a thousand streams and channels where herons dwell amid groves of green mangroves, providing metaphors for the dazzling prose of Rómulo Gallegos.