Venezuela Province

The Venezuela Province, also called the Province of Caracas, was the oldest Spanish province of the Venezuelan coast, founded in 1527 when Juan de Ampíes laid out Santa Ana de Coro on the western shoreline. Coro served as capital until 1546, El Tocuyo until 1577, and Caracas from then on. Its first decades were interrupted by an odd chapter: between 1528 and 1546 Charles V contracted the province to the German Welser banking house as Klein-Venedig, whose governors searched El Dorado so brutally that the crown took the grant back. The province defined itself against its neighbours, Margarita to the north, New Andalusia to the east, Guayana to the south and Maracaibo to the west, and it answered to the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo for most of its existence, with supervision moving to the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717 and to the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777. Legal oversight finally passed to the new Audiencia of Caracas in 1786. The province was one of seven that signed the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence, was folded into Gran Colombia, and in 1824 was recreated as a reduced Caracas province from which Aragua and Guárico were split in 1848. After the Federal War the states were created in 1864 and the province disappeared.