Venezuela

4 routes

Real JourneysSpeculative

Orellana: Down the Amazon, 1541–42

A search for the Land of Cinnamon turned into the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea. Francisco de Orellana, with the friar Gaspar de Carvajal as chronicler, followed unmapped rivers, fought off warriors on the banks and gave the river the name it still carries. The route runs from Quito to the Napo, the Rio Negro, the Amazon's mouth and the pearl island of Cubagua. River stops are approximate, and dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar still in use then.

7 locations3/7 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Humboldt in the Americas: 1799–1804

In 1799 the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland sailed for Spain's American realms and spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing across them. They watched electric eels fight wild horses in Venezuela, pushed up Chimborazo, watched a planet cross the Sun from Peru and ended as Jefferson's guest at the White House. This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.

8 locations4/8 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Bolívar's 1819 Campaign: Across the Andes to Boyacá

In 1819 Bolívar led an army from the flooded Llanos over the Páramo de Pisba, a pass 3,960 metres high that had been left unguarded because it seemed impassable. Weeks later he won at Boyacá and entered Santa Fe. The route follows him from the Congress of Angostura through the freezing crossing, the standoff at Gámeza and the lancers' charge at Vargas Swamp to the Boyacá bridge and the capital. Several stops are approximate, since the sources name regions rather than exact spots.

8 locations3/8 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Che Guevara and Alberto Granado: The 1952 Journey

In January 1952 Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set off to cross South America on an old 1939 Norton 500 they called La Poderosa, "The Mighty One". The bike died in Chile, and they went on by truck, steamer, raft, horse and on foot — some 8,000 kilometres in about nine months, ending at a leper colony on the Amazon and in Caracas. Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.

7 locations5/7 visitable