Venezuela historical timeline

Origins

Christopher Columbus reached the South American mainland here in 1498, the only time he did so. The following year Alonso de Ojeda saw stilt houses standing over the water of Lake Maracaibo and called the place Venezuela, little Venice — a joke that became a country. Spanish settlement produced a cacao economy worked by enslaved Africans, and a colony that mattered less to Madrid than Peru or Mexico did.

Turning points

Simón Bolívar was born in Caracas in 1783 and led the campaigns that liberated what became six countries; Gran Colombia, the union he built, broke apart within a decade. A century of strongmen followed. Then in 1914 oil was struck in the Maracaibo basin, and by the 1950s Venezuela was among the wealthiest countries in Latin America; it was a founding member of OPEC in 1960 and a functioning democracy from 1958. The oil price collapse of the 1980s, debt and austerity produced the Caracazo riots of 1989, which in turn produced Hugo Chávez — a failed coup leader in 1992 and an elected president in 1998. The Bolivarian Revolution funded extensive social programmes from high oil prices and nationalised much of the economy. After Chávez died in 2013 and prices fell, output collapsed, inflation reached figures with no modern parallel outside wartime, and roughly seven and a half million Venezuelans left — one of the largest displacement crises anywhere in the world.

Influential people

Bolívar, called the Liberator, whose name is on the currency, the country’s official title and half its public squares. Francisco de Miranda, who preceded him. Rómulo Betancourt, who built the democratic period. Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. And Gustavo Dudamel, who came out of El Sistema and now conducts some of the world’s major orchestras.

Cultural evolution

El Sistema is the country’s most admired institution: a publicly funded programme founded in 1975 that puts instruments into the hands of children in poor neighbourhoods and runs hundreds of youth orchestras. It has been copied in more than sixty countries. The joropo, played on harp, four-string cuatro and maracas, is the music of the plains. Arepas are eaten at every meal. And baseball, not football, is the national sport, a legacy of oil-company Americans in the 1920s.

Present-day significance

Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world and produces a fraction of what it once did. Angel Falls, in the sandstone tepui country of the south-east, is the highest waterfall on earth at almost a kilometre, and Canaima and Los Roques are extraordinary and almost entirely unvisited. The diaspora, spread across Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Spain and the United States, now amounts to roughly a quarter of the population.