The mountain ridge of El Avila National Park towers of the skyscrapers of Caracas. After a brief walking tour of central Caracas, Cuba's president, Fidel Castro, last year admonished Venezuelans for allowing development to run rampant over the city's Spanish colonial gems. He cited Havana's Old City as an example to follow.
Truth is, there was little of colonial Caracas to begin with.
Visitors to this sprawling capital with 4 million inhabitants should understand that Caracas has always embraced the new, the modern - and, in recent decades, the North American. Caracas's landscape today is dominated by modern steel and glass skyscrapers, its boulevards are choked with traffic, its hillsides congested with shantytowns. In the 1950s, dictator General Marcos Perez Jimenez embarked on massive projects, including a series of marble-lined tunnels burrowing through the coastal range to connect Caracas with its port, La Guiara. Venezuela exported its oil to the United States and imported American architectural styles. Perhaps the most important achievement of the period is the university, recognized as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.