Maracaibo

Maracaibo gave Venezuela its name — and oil gave Maracaibo everything else, then took it away. When Amerigo Vespucci sailed into Lake Maracaibo in 1499, the indigenous stilt houses reminded him of Venice, so he called the region 'Veneziola' — Little Venice. The lake itself is the key: South America's largest body of water (13,280 square kilometers), connected to the Caribbean through the narrow Tablazo Strait, with the Andes rising on three sides to trap heat, moisture, and — beneath the lakebed — one of Earth's richest petroleum deposits.

The city was founded three times before it stuck. German banker-explorers established 'Neu-Nurnberg' in 1529 under the Welser concession; it was abandoned by 1535. A second attempt in 1569 collapsed under indigenous resistance. Captain Pedro Maldonado's 1574 settlement finally held as 'Nueva Zamora de la Laguna de Maracaibo.' For 340 years, the city ran a diversified economy — cacao, coffee, cattle, Caribbean trade — and maintained closer commercial ties to Curacao and Colombia than to Caracas. The lake's geography made Maracaibo a natural water-hyacinth of a city: spreading across available resources, self-sufficient within its basin.

Then came the Barroso II blowout of 1922. The well erupted with such force that it signaled the start of large-scale oil extraction in the Maracaibo Basin. By 1929, Venezuela was the world's second-largest oil producer. Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil's Creole Petroleum extracted wealth on an industrial scale, and the $15 billion petrochemical complex along the lake became the country's economic liver. The General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge (1962, designed by Riccardo Morandi — the same engineer whose later Genoa bridge collapsed in 2018) finally connected Maracaibo to the rest of Venezuela after 380 years of physical isolation.

The resource curse arrived on schedule. Venezuela's GDP shrank over 70% between 2014 and 2024, and Maracaibo — whose basin accounts for roughly half of national crude export capacity — suffered disproportionately. Electrical blackouts, water shortages, and mass emigration hollowed out a city that had been one of Latin America's wealthiest. The lake itself tells the story: untreated sewage (only 20% of 10,000 liters per second is processed) fed an explosive duckweed invasion that covered up to 20% of the lake surface — a biological monoculture choking a body of water, mirroring how oil monoculture choked economic diversity. Above the lake, the Catatumbo Lightning strikes up to 260 nights per year at the river mouth — the highest density on Earth — a natural beacon that guided Caribbean sailors for centuries and now illuminates a city searching for its next chapter.