100 Places To Remember: Caracas, Venezuela
Geschreven op 14-3-2010 - Erik van Erne. Geplaatst in Natuur
The Dangerous Birthplace of El Libertador. Spanish conquistadors harried the indigenous people from this beautiful valley in the north of South America in 1567 and founded Caracas among the green coastal mountains, or Cordillera de la Costa. Some two hundred years later, the city was the birthplace of El Libertador, the common name for Simón Bolívar, who headed the liberation of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Panama from the Spaniards.
The war of independence finally ended in victory in 1821, a decade after Bolívar and his followers had prematurely proclaimed independence in Caracas. A year after the initial rebellion, an earthquake had destroyed the city and transformed the valley into a cemetery, an event viewed by the Spanish as divine retribution. The more prosaic but tragic truth is that the tremor caused landslides to send thousands of tons of soil and debris cascading down the steep mountainsides into the valley. It is a phenomenon that may well recur, caused by torrential rainstorms as well as earthquakes.
Around 4.3 million people live in Caracas, some two million of them in poorly built shanty towns or barrios on the slopes that surround the city, where landslides caused by heavy rain are a chronic problem. In 1999, 30,000 people were killed in one of the Americas worst natural disasters, when several days of rainstorms triggered flash floods, landslides and flows of debris in the coastal zone on the north slopes of Cordillera de la Costa just north of Caracas.
Extreme weather events like hurricanes and heavy rainstorms are projected to hit the region of Caracas and Cordillera de la Costa more frequently in future, and with much greater force. It is not only those living in the shanty towns who face a hazardous future. Floods and landslides pose a serious threat to the centre of Caracas as well, potentially dealing a massive blow to the infrastructure of the Venezuelan capital and its suburbs.
