Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Includes Climates Which May Be
Termed Temperate Rather Than Hot; And It Is Looked Upon In The
Country, Notwithstanding
The distance of more than a hundred
leagues, as a prolongation of the metalliferous soil of Pamplona.
It was in
The group of the western mountains of Venezuela, that the
Spaniards, in the year 1551, worked the gold mine of Buria,* (*
Real de Minas de San Felipe de Buria.) which was the origin of the
foundation of the town of Barquisimeto.* (* Nueva Segovia.) But
these works, like many other mines successively opened, were soon
abandoned. Here, as in all the mountains of Venezuela, the produce
of the ore has been found to be very variable. The lodes are very
often divided, or they altogether cease; and the metals appear only
in kidney-ores, and present the most delusive appearances. It is,
however, only in this group of mountains of San Felipe and
Barquisimeto, that the working of mines has been continued till the
present time. Those of Aroa, near San Felipe el Fuerte, situated in
the centre of a very insalubrious country, are the only mines which
are wrought in the whole capitania-general of Caracas. They yield a
small quantity of copper.
Next to the works at Buria, near Barquisimeto, those of the valley
of Caracas, and of the mountains near the capital, are the most
ancient. Francisco Faxardo and his wife Isabella, of the nation of
the Guaiquerias,* often visited the table-land where the capital of
Venezuela is now situated. (* Faxardo and his wife were the
founders of the town of the Collado, now called Caravalleda.) They
had given this table-land the name of Valle de San Francisco; and
having seen some bits of gold in the hands of the natives, Faxardo
succeeded, in the year 1560, in discovering the mines of Los
Teques,* to the south-west of Caracas, near the group of the
mountains of Cocuiza, which separate the valleys of Caracas and
Aragua. (* Thirteen years later, in 1573, Gabriel de Avila, one of
the alcaldes of the new town of Caracas, renewed the working of
these mines, which were from that time called the "Real de Minas de
Nuestra Senora." Probably this same Avila, on account of a few
farms which he possessed in the mountains adjacent to La Guayra and
Caracas, has occasioned the Cumbre to receive the name of Montana
de Avila. This name has subsequently been applied erroneously to
the Silla, and to all the chain which extends towards cape Codera.)
It is thought that in the first of these valleys, near Baruta,
south of the village of Valle, the natives had made some
excavations in veins of auriferous quartz; and that, when the
Spaniards first settled there, and founded the town of Caracas,
they filled the shafts, which had been dry, with water. It is now
impossible to ascertain this fact; but it is certain that, long
before the Conquest, grains of gold were a medium of exchange, I do
not say generally, but among certain nations of the New Continent.
They gave gold for the purchase of pearls; and it does not appear
extraordinary, that, after having for a long time picked up grains
of gold in the rivulets, people who had fixed habitations, and were
devoted to agriculture, should have tried to trace the auriferous
veins in the superior surface of the soil.
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