El Dorado is a small town in eastern
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 ...
. It is situated in
Bolívar State, on the
Cuyuni River
The Cuyuni River is a South American river and a tributary of the Essequibo River. It rises in the Guiana Highlands of Venezuela, where it descends northward to El Dorado, and turns eastward to meander through the tropical rain forests of the Cu ...
. It is the second-largest town in
Sifontes Municipality
The Sifontes Municipality is one of the 11 municipalities (municipios) that makes up the Venezuelan state of Bolívar and, according to the 2011 census by the National Institute of Statistics of Venezuela, the municipality has a population of 50, ...
; the capital of the municipality is
Tumeremo
Tumeremo is a town in the state of Bolívar in eastern Venezuela. It is the shire town of the Sifontes Municipality.
History
Its first settlers were Guayan Indians and Kamaracotos, coming from the savanna of the Divina Pastora and Tupuquen l ...
.
It is on the road to
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. El Dorado has a small airport .
History
El Dorado was founded in the 1890s. Gold mining was developing in the area, and there was a background of international tension caused by the
Essequibo border dispute between Venezuela and Britain.
Prison
The town has a prison, the ''Centro Penitenciario de Oriente El Dorado''.
The Venezuelan prison system is generally overcrowded,
and El Dorado prison has been described in the British press as "notorious".
In 2015 the Venezuelan press reported the completion of a stage in a project to expand the prison, providing new facilities for the rehabilitation of offenders.
Prisoners
*
Henri Charrière
Henri Charrière (; 16 November 1906 – 29 July 1973) was a French writer, convicted in 1931 as a murderer by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the novel '' Papillon'', a memoir of his incarceration in and escape from a pena ...
. The prison is mentioned in the book
''Papillon''.
While the accuracy of the book has been questioned, it is not disputed that its author, Henri Charrière, was imprisoned in Venezuela in the 1940s,
[ (subscription required)] an epoch when the prisoners were assigned to mobile detention camps.
References
External links
Sifontes Official Web Site
{{Venezuela-geo-stub
Populated places in Bolívar (state)
Prisons in Venezuela