Caicara del Orinoco is a town in, and the administrative seat of, Cedeño Municipality, Bolívar State,

Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...

. Currently the Venezuelan government is building a bridge across the

Orinoco The Orinoco () is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers , with 76.3 percent of it in Venezuela and the remainder in Colombia. It is the fourth largest river in the wor ...

at Caicara. When completed the bridge will be 2.4 km long.

Prehistory

Alexander von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 17696 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, p ...

discovered

petroglyph A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions ...

s carved in the

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

and

gneiss Gneiss ( ) is a common and widely distributed type of metamorphic rock. It is formed by high-temperature and high-pressure metamorphic processes acting on formations composed of igneous or sedimentary rocks. Gneiss forms at higher temperatures an ...

near the river at Caicara.Bendrat, T. A. (1912)
"Discovery of Some New Petroglyphs near Caicara on the Orinoco"
''

American Journal of Archaeology The ''American Journal of Archaeology'' (AJA), the peer-reviewed journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, has been published since 1897 (continuing the ''American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts'' founded by t ...

'' 16(4): pp. 518-523, pp. 518-519 (accessed via JSTOR) Further investigation revealed a large number of prehistoric petroglyphs in the area.

History

It was founded in the middle of the Eighteenth Century.

Politics

The Mayor of Caicara del Orinoco is Rafael Gutiérrez, a member of the

United Socialist Party of Venezuela The United Socialist Party of Venezuela ( es, Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, PSUV) is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left Socialism, socialist political party which has been the ruling party of Venezuela since ...

Notes

Populated places in Bolívar (state) Petroglyphs Rock art in South America Archaeological sites in Venezuela Pre-Columbian archaeological sites {{BolívarVE-geo-stub