Cabimas Coast

Cabimas lies on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, where the dry coast of Zulia meets a vast inland sea. Its name is usually traced to the cabima tree, whose medicinal oil was gathered from the surrounding woodland. The Caquetío people inhabited this side of the lake in stilt villages, fishing its waters and using the bitumen that seeped to the surface.

The lake formed the region’s chief road. Canoes and small boats linked fishing camps, shore settlements and the routes leading toward the Andes and the Caribbean. In 1758 Capuchin friars established the short-lived Mission of San Ambrosio de Punta de Piedra at the site. The settlement that endured became a fishing community on the lake coast, recorded by Archbishop Mariano Martí when he visited in 1771.

By the early nineteenth century Cabimas remained a modest shore settlement, remote from the larger towns of the province and dependent on lake traffic. Its later oil history would transform the coast, but the older geography still survived in the relationship between jetty, boat, fishing ground and dry land.