Venezuela

Angel Falls, the highest uninterrupted waterfall on earth, drops from the flat top of Auyán-tepui in south-eastern Venezuela. The tepuis of the Guiana Highlands, sheer-sided sandstone mesas, rise above the rainforest like islands. North of them the Orinoco crosses to a vast Atlantic delta, and its floods spread each wet season over the Llanos, grasslands of cattle ranches and capybaras. The last spurs of the Andes climb above Mérida, and storms over the Catatumbo river mouth light up Lake Maracaibo on many nights.

Spanish explorers who saw stilt houses on the Maracaibo shore in 1499 were reminded of Venice, and the name Venezuela, ‘little Venice’, followed. Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar led the fight against Spain: independence was declared in July 1811 and secured at Carabobo in 1821. Venezuela left Gran Colombia in 1830. In 1922 a gusher at La Rosa revealed the oil beneath the Maracaibo basin, and in 1960 the Venezuelan minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo helped found OPEC.

Breakfast is often an arepa, a griddled maize cake split and stuffed. Baseball outranks football, and the shortstop Luis Aparicio was the first Venezuelan elected to its Hall of Fame. The joropo, danced to harp, cuatro and maracas, comes from the Llanos, and in 1975 José Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema, the youth orchestras that trained Gustavo Dudamel. Oil, from the western basins and the heavy crude of the Orinoco Belt, has dominated exports for a century.