THE ITY OF ORO

To visit Coro in Venezuela is to become immersed in a dream of color and clay.

Under the burning sun, the front of the houses, weaved with mud, branches and herbs, captivate by the nobility with which they stand upon the paved streets.

The very noble and loyal Santa Ana de Coro, was founded in 1527, after an alliance between the Caquetian indians and the Spaniards. Irregularly, above the indian town a clay city was built and was the seat of the first province of Venezuela and also of the first Bishop of South America.

Coro, which is charmingly sketched along the western Venezualan coast, was the entry point to the region for many hundreds of years.

Its architecture seems to blur with its environment, which conveys it with great intensity to the enraptured visitor. Coro has been made with the same clayed soil upon which it rises, between dunes and a xerophilous vegetation.

The strong trade winds transform the landscape, baptizing with its moist drizzle the oldest city in Venezuela: Coro , word with which the Indians knew the wind.

Here are present the wattela and daub, the clay, the adobe and the rubblework, ancient techniques which are practiced today, offering a beautiful and functional architecture.

This is a city with the priviliege to narrate the arcitectural transformations all through the XVI to the XX centuries.

It shows all kinds of styles, Neogothic, Mudejar, Reneaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical; with a very characteristic style and made with clay in solid constructions which follow smooth lines decorated with shiny colors.

In December of 1993, the clay city of the Caribean was declared as a Cultural and Natural Heritage of Mankind by U.N.E.S.C.O., thanks to the struggle of its inhabitants which have stood up with the strong thrusts of modernism.

Karina R. Durand V.