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 Is A Land The More Interesting In A Geognostical Point
Of View, As No Map Has Yet Made Known The Mountainous Ramifications
Which The Paramos Of Niquitao And Las Rosas Send Out Towards The
North-East.
Between Tocuyo, Araure, and Barquisimeto, rises the
group of the Altar Mountains, connected on the south-east with the
paramo of Las Rosas.
A branch of the Altar stretches north-east by
San Felipe el Fuerte, joining the granitic mountains of the coast
near Porto Cabello. The other branch takes an eastward direction
towards Nirgua and Tinaco, and joins the chain of the interior,
that of Yusma, Villa de Cura, and Sabana de Ocumare.
The region we have been here describing separates the waters which
flow to the Orinoco from those which run into the immense lake of
Maracaybo and the Caribbean Sea. 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.
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