Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The City Of Nueva Valencia Occupies A Considerable Extent Of Ground,
But Its Population Scarcely Amounts To Six Or Seven
Thousand souls.
The streets are very broad, the market place, (plaza mayor,) is of
vast dimensions; and, the houses being
Low, the disproportion between
the population of the town, and the space that it occupies, is still
greater than at Caracas. Many of the whites, (especially the poorest,)
forsake their houses, and live the greater part of the year in their
little plantations of indigo and cotton, where they can venture to
work with their own hands; which, according to the inveterate
prejudices of that country, would be a disgrace to them in the town.
Nueva Valencia, founded in 1555 under the government of Villacinda, by
Alonzo Diaz Moreno, is twelve years older than Caracas. Valencia was
at first only a dependency of Burburata; but this latter town is
nothing now but a place of embarkation for mules. It is regretted, and
perhaps justly, that Valencia has not become the capital of the
country. Its situation in a plain, on the banks of a lake, recalls to
mind the position of Mexico. When we reflect on the easy communication
afforded by the valleys of Aragua with the Llanos and the rivers that
flow into the Orinoco; when we recognize the possibility of opening an
inland navigation, by the Rio Pao and the Portuguesa, as far as the
mouths of the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Amazon, it may be
conceived that the capital of the vast provinces of Venezuela would
have been better placed near the fine harbour of Porto Cabello,
beneath a pure and serene sky, than near the unsheltered road of La
Guayra, in a temperate but constantly foggy valley.
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