Aragua

The Aragua valleys lie around Lake Tacarigua in northern Venezuela, between the coastal mountains and the Llanos. Indigenous communities inhabited the fertile basin before Spanish conquest. Valencia grew west of the lake as a colonial town, while farms and estates occupied the valleys. The lake and the streams descending from the mountains gave this inland country its distinctive landscape.

The traditional foundation of Valencia is dated to 1555, although historians differ on the precise circumstances. During the wars of independence the region became a strategic crossroads between Caracas and western Venezuela. On 24 June 1821 Simón Bolívar’s army defeated royalist forces at Carabobo, near Valencia. The victory secured the republican cause in much of Venezuela and made the surrounding plains a landmark of the independence struggle.