Francisco Becerro / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Caracas
Population: 28.5 million+
Language: Spanish (plus 30 official indigenous languages)
1 – Angel Falls (also above)
Angel Falls drops 979 m from the rim of Auyán-tepui in Canaima National Park, Bolívar state, making it the world’s tallest uninterrupted waterfall, and although the Pemón have long known it as Kerepakupai Merú, roughly “waterfall of the deepest place”, it became known to the wider world only in the 1930s.
With no road anywhere near Angel Falls, the trip means a flight into Canaima, then hours in a motorised dugout up the Carrao and Churún rivers, a forest walk to the viewpoint and a night in a hammock, with the falls at their fullest in the wet season.
Angel Falls takes its English name from Jimmie Angel, an American pilot hunting for gold who landed on the boggy summit in 1937, stuck fast in the mud and walked out with his wife and two companions over 11 days, while his plane stayed on the tepui for 33 years until it was lifted off by helicopter in 1970.
2 – Mount Roraima
Mount Roraima is a 2,810 m sandstone table mountain in the Gran Sabana, with most of its summit in Venezuela, built from rock around two billion years old and cut off for so long that much of the plant and animal life on top is found nowhere else.
The trek up Mount Roraima from the village of Paraitepui usually takes five to six days there and back, camping under rock overhangs on the way to a black, wind-carved summit of peat bogs, carnivorous plants, cold pools and fields of quartz crystals, where nights can drop close to freezing.
Mount Roraima is often said to have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, while on neighbouring Kukenán-tepui the thumbnail-sized pebble toad escapes tarantulas by tucking in its limbs and bouncing away down the rock like a loose stone.
3 – Caracas
Caracas, founded by Diego de Losada in 1567, lies in a narrow valley at about 900 m beneath the green wall of the Ávila, and it was here that Simón Bolívar was born in 1783 and that the movement that deposed the Spanish captain general began on 19 April 1810.
The colonial core of Caracas holds the Casa Natal where Bolívar was born, Plaza Bolívar, the cathedral and the Panteón Nacional, where Bolívar’s remains were laid in 1876 and where Cork-born Daniel Florence O’Leary, his aide-de-camp, was reburied in 1882.
The Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, built to designs by Carlos Raúl Villanueva from the 1940s to the 1960s and UNESCO-listed in 2000, is a working campus filled with commissioned art by Léger, Arp and Calder, whose floating acoustic “Clouds” hang above the Aula Magna, so students walk to lectures through a World Heritage site.
4 – Los Roques
Los Roques is a coral archipelago some 130–160 km off the Venezuelan coast, with around 300 islands, cays and sandbanks set around a shallow turquoise lagoon, protected as a national park since 1972 and listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1996.
Gran Roque, the gateway to Los Roques, has the airstrip, sandy streets and painted guesthouses, from where small boats run out to the outer cays for snorkelling over two large coral barriers, with hawksbill, green and loggerhead turtles nesting on the beaches.
Gran Roque, a single village, is the only permanent settlement in Los Roques, though fishermen set up seasonal camps on other islands, and strict park rules have spared the archipelago the large-scale development seen across much of the Caribbean.
5 – Coro
Santa Ana de Coro was founded in 1527 near the Caribbean coast in what is Falcón state, became the seat of Venezuela’s first bishopric in 1531 and, with its port of La Vela, became the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993.
Coro’s more than 600 historic buildings are made not of stone but of earth, from bahareque of woven cane and mud to adobe or rammed earth, worked in Spanish, Mudéjar and, later, Dutch styles carried over from nearby Curaçao, while the cathedral, begun in 1583, is one of the two oldest churches in Venezuela.
Earthen towns are not meant to last five centuries, and Coro shows the strain, as heavy rain in successive years did so much damage that UNESCO added it to the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2005.
6 – Llovizna Falls
Llovizna Falls is a broad, roaring set of cascades on the Caroní River just before it meets the Orinoco, set within Ciudad Guayana, a planned industrial city founded in 1961 around steel, aluminium and hydroelectric power by uniting San Félix, Puerto Ordaz and neighbouring settlements.
The park around Llovizna Falls spreads across forested islands linked by footbridges and walkways that lead close enough to feel the spray, with the neighbouring Cachamay park nearby, as well as the Ecomuseo del Caroní, built into the Macagua dam.
Llovizna Falls takes its name from the Spanish for “drizzle”, after the fine mist that hangs over the river, and the same Caroní drives the Guri and Macagua dams, part of one of the largest hydroelectric systems in South America.
7 – Ciudad Bolívar
Ciudad Bolívar stands where the Orinoco narrows, founded in 1764 and known for most of its history as Angostura, Spanish for “the narrows”, and it was Simón Bolívar’s base when the Congress of Angostura, opened by his address on 15 February 1819, proclaimed the Republic of Colombia, known as Gran Colombia, in December 1819.
The old town of Ciudad Bolívar is a run of ochre, blue and white colonial houses stepping down to the river, with the Casa del Congreso de Angostura on the main square, as well as a modern art museum devoted to the local-born artist Jesús Soto.
Angostura bitters were perfected in Ciudad Bolívar in 1824 by Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, a German surgeon in Bolívar’s army, as a tonic for soldiers’ stomach complaints, and although his sons later moved production to Trinidad, the little yellow-capped bottle in cocktail bars around the world carries the town’s old name.
8 – Mérida
Mérida is a colonial university city at about 1,600 m in the Venezuelan Andes, founded in 1558 and home to the Universidad de Los Andes, whose roots go back to a seminary of 1785, as well as the base for climbs on Pico Bolívar, the country’s highest peak at 4,978 m.
From the centre of Mérida, the Mukumbarí cable car, rebuilt and reopened in 2016, climbs in stages to Pico Espejo at about 4,765 m on what is often described as one of the highest and longest cable cars in the world, with the páramo of Sierra Nevada National Park beyond.
The peaks above Mérida held all of Venezuela’s glaciers, and when the last, the Humboldt Glacier, was reclassified as an ice field in 2024, Venezuela was widely reported to be the first country in modern times to lose all its glaciers.
9 – Isla Margarita
Isla Margarita, Venezuela’s largest island, lies about 40 km off the north-east coast, sighted by Columbus in 1498 and often said to be named for the pearls of its oyster beds, worked by enslaved Indigenous divers, with the ruins of Nueva Cádiz, one of the earliest Spanish towns in the Americas, on neighbouring Cubagua.
The draw on Isla Margarita is beaches and forts, from Playa El Agua and the windsurfing at El Yaque to the mangrove channels of La Restinga lagoon, the Castillo San Carlos Borromeo at Pampatar and the hilltop Fortín Santa Rosa above La Asunción.
At the end of 1819, John Devereux’s Irish Legion, recruited in Ireland and shipped from Dún Laoghaire, landed on Isla Margarita to fight for Bolívar, but yellow fever and other diseases killed hundreds of the volunteers on the island.
10 – Los Llanos
Los Llanos is an enormous seasonally flooded savanna across the Orinoco basin, cattle country since the 1500s worked from vast ranches called hatos, and home to the llaneros, whose horsemen under José Antonio Páez joined Bolívar and helped win independence at the Battle of Carabobo on 24 June 1821.
The wildlife of Los Llanos is among the easiest to see in South America, with herds of capybara, spectacled caiman, anaconda, giant anteater, scarlet ibis and jabiru storks among hundreds of bird species, best seen in the December–April dry season when animals crowd around the shrinking pools.
Capybara is a Lenten dish in Los Llanos because, according to popular tradition, colonial clergy obtained Church permission to class the world’s largest rodent as fish, pointing out that it lives in water and has partly webbed feet.
11 – Lake Maracaibo
Lake Maracaibo, often called South America’s largest lake though it opens to the Caribbean, sits above the oil that has shaped Venezuela since the Barroso II well blew out near Cabimas in 1922, and on 16 February 1942, German U-boats struck the shallow-draught tankers carrying its crude to the refineries of Aruba.
The name Venezuela is traditionally traced to the stilt houses of Lake Maracaibo, which reminded early Spanish voyagers of Venice, and palafito villages on poles are found in the south of the lake, while the 8.7 km Rafael Urdaneta bridge spans its neck at Maracaibo city.
Where the Catatumbo River enters Lake Maracaibo, storms flash on as many as 260 nights a year, giving the lake the Guinness record for the highest concentration of lightning, and tradition holds that on 24 July 1823, it lit up the Spanish fleet for the patriot squadron that destroyed it.
12 – Orinoco Delta
The Orinoco Delta fans out across north-eastern Venezuela as the great river splits into many channels on its way to the Atlantic, forming one of the largest swamp deltas in the world, a maze of mangroves, palm swamps and forest that is home to the Warao, whose name is usually translated as “marshland people”.
From Tucupita, the main town of the Orinoco Delta, boats wind through the channels past Warao houses raised on stilts above the tide and thatched with palm, while the moriche palm has long given the Warao a starchy staple as well as the fibre for the hammocks they weave.
In August 1498, the fresh water pouring out of the Orinoco Delta pushed so far into the Gulf of Paria that Christopher Columbus suspected he had found a great continent, and the devout admiral even speculated that a river so vast might flow from the Earthly Paradise itself.