118 SOUTH AMERICA— THE ANDES REGIONS. 



even a state capital, this distinction having been awarded to the little town o£ 

 Cajxitarida, situated on the coast midway between Coro and Maracaibo. 



Tnijillo, standing 2,700 feet above sea-level, at the entrance of an upland valley 

 in the Sierra Nevada range, has shifted its position several times since its 

 foundation in the middle of the sixteenth century. As a mining town surrounded 

 by extremely fertile plains, it attracted corsairs as well as colonists, and was 

 sacked bv the pirate Gramont in 1668, when most of the inhabitants took refuge 

 in Merida. An unfinished railway, running through Mendoza, Valera, Motalan, 

 and the port of La Cciba, will eventually connect it with Lake Maracaibo. 



Merida^Maracaibo. 



Merida, named from the famous city of Estremadura, lies in the heart of the 

 Andes, on the bed of an old lake, where converge several affluents of the Rio 

 Chama, which flows to Lake Maracaibo. It stands at an altitude of 5,450 feet, 

 that is, in a temperate climate, in which European plants flourish side by side 

 with tropical species. Being built of low houses surrounded by gardens, Merida 

 covers a large space on the edge of a perfectly level plateau about 1,000 feet 

 above a narrow gorge of the foaming Rio Chama. 



Founded in 1558 under the name of Satitiago de los Caballeros, Merida still 

 remains to a large extent a Spanish town, although the surrounding valleys are 

 inhabited almost exclusively by half-breeds, sprung from alliances with the old 

 Timotes and Mucuchies tribes. The latter give their name to a town which is 

 the highest town in the republic (9,850 feet). Several villages, however, stand 

 1,000, 1,200, and even 1,400 feet higher, and one house occasionally occupied 

 dominates all at an elevation of 11,960 feet. Participating in the liberal ten- 

 dencies of the a-,e, Merida has recently transformed its large ecclesiastical 

 seminary to a university, the only one possessed by Venezuela besides that of the 

 capital. It is proposed to connect Merida by rail with the port of Zitlia, which 

 lies on a navigable aflluent of Lake ]\laracaibo. Oil-wells have been sunk in the 

 vicinity, and the Indian village of LogunilJas, on the road to San Carlos, obtains 

 from a neighbouring lagoon a kind of carbonate of soda used in the preparation 

 of tobacco. 



Zulia (San Carlos de Zulia) has given its name to all the low-lying lands 

 dominated by the last chain of the Andes. The river on which it stands, over 

 against Santa Barbara, has received the name of Rio Escalante, while farther west 

 flows the true Rio Zulia, which, however, communicates with the Escalante through 

 the Catatumbo, forming a network of channels and a large marshy lagoon known as 

 the Lagon de Zulia. By this waterway Colombia sends its coffee and other produce 

 down to the great market of Maracaibo. The same natural route also connects the 

 Venezuelan towns of Tovar, Bailadores, and Grita with Maracaibo. 



This place, the Nueva Zamora of its Spanish founders, dates from the year 

 1571, though a first settlement of the same name had been destroyed by corsairs 

 three years previously. It stood on the same beach where the conqueror Alfinger 

 had, in 1529, built some large shelters for the women and children captured 



