Falcón

• 1. Introduction

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  Falcón State sits at the northern tip of Venezuela, where desert dunes roll almost into the sea and a single strip of land ties the Paraguaná Peninsula to the continent. The state capital is Coro, a city founded in 1527 under the name Santa Ana de Coro, and today recognized by UNESCO as a Cultural Patrimony of Humanity. On the 29th of April 2015, a thermometer in Coro climbed to 43.6 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded in Venezuela. That number is a fitting introduction to a land defined by extremes. Falcón is Venezuela's most coastline-rich state, yet much of that coast receives less than 300 millimetres of rain each year. It holds one of the largest oil refining complexes on earth, yet its soils classify as nearly 90 percent very low agricultural potential. And it carries the name of a man who once led a revolution, though the cities he fought for have shifted names and allegiances more than once. Who was Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, and why does a state bear his name? How did a city loyal to the Spanish Crown in 1811 become the cradle of the Federal War less than fifty years later? And what grows, survives, and thrives in a landscape that is half desert and half Caribbean coast?

• 2. From Colony to Federation

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  Juan de la Cosa and Américo Vespucio first set European eyes on this territory in 1499, arriving as part of an expedition supervised by Alonso de Ojeda. The city of Coro followed in 1527, founded by Juan Ampíes and named Santa Ana de Coro. When Venezuela declared independence from Spain in 1811, Coro broke with the rest of the country and stayed loyal to the Crown, merging instead with the Province of Maracaibo. King Fernando VII then carved out a separate Province of Coro in 1815. Six years later, in 1821, a military commander named Josefa Camejo liberated the province from Spanish control during the Venezuelan War of Independence, and the territory passed into the new Republic of Gran Colombia under the department of Zulia. Venezuela separated from Gran Colombia in 1830, and the Falcón area became its own distinct province within the new nation. By 1856, that province was divided into recognizable cantons: Coro, San Luis, Casigua, Costa Arriba, Cumarebo, and the Paraguaná Peninsula. Then came the Federal War, which began on the 20th of February 1859, in Coro itself. The area was immediately declared the Independent State of Coro, and by 1864 it had been absorbed into the United States of Venezuela as a federal state.

• 3. A Name in Flux

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  1872 brought the renaming that stuck longest: the province became Falcón State, honoring Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, the Federal War leader whose campaigns had reshaped the Venezuelan political order. But the name was never entirely stable. In 1879, Falcón was folded together with Lara and Yaracuy, minus the Department of Nirgua, into the Western Northern State. Between 1881 and 1890, it merged with Zulia to form the combined state of Falcón-Zulia. A separate Falcón was reestablished in 1891. Then in 1899, the state briefly reclaimed the older name Estado Coro, only to revert to Falcón again by 1901. That same year, 1899, the towns of Tucacas and Chichiriviche were annexed into Falcón, while the municipality of Urdaneta passed to Lara State. The city of Coro itself was declared a National Monument in 1950, and on the 9th of December 1993, UNESCO named it and the neighboring port La Vela de Coro a Cultural Patrimony of Humanity. La Vela de Coro holds a particular distinction: it is the site where Venezuela's national flag was first raised.

• 4. Desert, Sea, and Mountain

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  Rainfall below 180 millimetres per year falls on Punto Fijo, on the Paraguaná Peninsula, giving it some of the driest conditions in the country. Coro itself receives 380 millimetres annually, with an average temperature of 28.4 degrees Celsius, while the isthmus of Los Médanos de Coro drops below 300 millimetres and averages between 28 and 29 degrees. Moving east, the picture changes entirely: coastal sectors there receive between 800 and 1,200 millimetres of rain each year. Higher still, in the Sierras de San Luis and Churuguara, annual rainfall reaches 1,300 millimetres and temperatures settle around 22 degrees Celsius, a genuinely sub-humid environment. The Sierra de San Luis holds the highest altitude in the entire Corian System, yet its peaks do not exceed 1,600 metres. In the middle of the Paraguaná Peninsula, Cerro Santa Ana rises in three peaks, with the highest summit reaching roughly 830 metres above sea level. Unlike the surrounding xerophytic scrubland, Santa Ana Hill stays green. Underground, below the San Luis range inside the Cueva del Toro, lies a freshwater lake known as Río Acarite, the largest known underground lake in Venezuela. The Tocuyo River, the main Venezuelan river of the Caribbean basin, crosses a large stretch of Falcón before flowing into the sea after travelling 423 kilometres.

• 5. Wildlife at the Edges

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  Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens, the greenbottle-blue tarantula, is native to the Paraguaná region of Falcón, its vivid coloring a sharp contrast against the arid scrub. Sharing those lowlands is Scolopendra gigantea, the largest centipede in the world. In the caves of the Juan Crisóstomo Falcón National Park, scientists discovered the Hueque scorpion, Tityus falconensis, named after the region and now found throughout the state. The coastal mangroves of Morrocoy and the Cuare Wildlife Refuge shelter the Orinoco crocodile, critically endangered and rarely seen. Sea turtles also navigate these protected waters. Caribbean flamingos wade alongside scarlet ibis, herons, and gannets along the shores. In the cactus and spiny forests of the lowlands, the cují yaque serves as Falcón's emblematic tree, growing among Opuntia cactus and Pachycereus pringlei. The vermilion cardinal and the tropical mockingbird, locally called paraulata llanera or chuchube, are among the birds of this dry habitat. Higher in the cloud forests, the guácharo, or oilbird, nests inside limestone caverns, while the keel-billed toucan and the blacksmith's bellbird inhabit the upper slopes alongside the nibbling turtle, an amphibian endemic to the mountains of the Sistema Coriano.

• 6. Refining and Harvesting

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  Falcón is the largest producer of coconuts and copra in Venezuela, with coconut cultivation alone covering approximately 20,000 hectares. Coffee grows across 3,500 hectares in the Sierra de San Luis and Sierra de Churuguara, though the state has an estimated 12,700 hectares available for that crop. The fishing fleet lands 30,471 tons of fish and seafood annually through ports including Las Piedras, Puerto Cumarebo, Zazárida, Chichiriviche, and La Vela de Coro. Shrimp farms operate at Boca de Ricoa and at points along the Paraguaná Peninsula. Beneath the peninsula, however, lies the industry that defines Falcón's place in the national economy. The Paraguaná Refining Center, made up of the Amuay Refining Complex and the Cardón Refinery, has a combined capacity of 940,000 barrels of oil per day, representing 75 percent of Venezuela's total refining capacity. The refineries draw crude from the Maracaibo Lake basin. Coal deposits in the western zone carry proven reserves estimated at 20 million metric tons for open-pit mining, with additional reserves estimated at 120 million metric tons across a 50,000-hectare zone. Of the state's salt flats, only the Las Cumaraguas salt mine operates at industrial scale; the rest are worked by hand across an estimated 220,000 hectares suitable for salt production.

• 7. Culture and Celebration

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  The Baile de las Turas traces back to an indigenous dance tied to the hunting season and the harvest of corn, and it is still celebrated on the 23rd and the 24th of September each year, in the mountain communities of San Pedro, El Tural, and Mapararí. The craftsmen around Coro build furniture from cardon cactus wood, the stick of Arch, and the curarí, finishing pieces with sisal fibre or animal skins. In Paraguaná, potters apply the same clay-working techniques the Caquetíos Indians used, producing objects for everyday domestic use. On the eastern coast, weavers work with bulrush, cocuiza, and vine to create basketwork and hammocks. The Day of the Mad, celebrated on the 28th of December in La Vela de Coro, fills the streets and public squares with masked parades that the source describes as reaching a display comparable to the great carnivals of the world. Goat talkarí, goat milk cheese, and goat milk candy are central to the local table, alongside rice with coconut, a sweet that is especially popular at Easter. The village of Curimagua, in the Falcón Mountains, carries a political memory as the birthplace of the pre-independence movement led by José Leonardo Chirino, known as Zambo, a detail that connects Falcón's landscape to the earliest stirrings of Venezuelan independence long before the Federal War brought Coro to the center of the national story.