Lagunillas is the capital city of the municipality of
Sucre in the state of Mérida, Venezuela.
It is from the city of
Mérida.
The old town is of interest to tourists.
The town is known for the large number of artifacts created with local materials.
Lagoon
The city is in a semi-arid zone in the middle basin of the
Chama River, with a warm, dry climate.
It contains the Laguna de Urao, a natural lagoon that helps cool the air, and adds humidity, named after an indigenous word for
sodium sesquicarbonate
Sodium sesquicarbonate (systematic name: trisodium hydrogendicarbonate) Na3H(CO3)2 is a double salt of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate (NaHCO3 · Na2CO3), and has a needle-like crystal structure. However, the term is also applied to a ...
, which is found in the lake. This material was traditionally used to make . This lagoon is full of
brackish water
Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. It may result from mixing seawater (salt water) and fresh water together, as in estuari ...
.
The French chemist
Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1801–1887) discovered the mineral
Gaylussite
Gaylussite is a carbonate mineral, a hydrated sodium calcium carbonate, formula Na2Ca(CO3)2·5H2O. It occurs as translucent, vitreous white to grey to yellow monoclinic prismatic crystals. It is an unstable mineral which dehydrates in dry air and ...
in the lagoon in 1826.
It is named for the French chemist
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (, , ; 6 December 1778 – 9 May 1850) was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (with Alexander von Humboldt), for two laws ...
(1778-1850).
The lagoon was declared a natural monument on 18 June 1979. However, areas surrounding the lagoon were left open to development, leading to a continuing deterioration in the lagoon's quality, as well as to a slow decrease in its size. An NGO was created in 2016 to protect the lagoon.
In February 2017 residents of the Sucre municipality denounced the deterioration of drying up of the Urao Lagoon, the main tourist attraction in the area, which they attribute to indiscriminate construction of housing and to climate change.
They blamed the local authorities for issuing construction permits and the environmental authority for failing to implement protective measures.
Miscellaneous
An oil camp for Shell Venezuela workers in Lagunillas was designed by the architect
José Lino Vaamonde in 1954.
This was a self-contained community where the workers were isolated from the "wild" exterior.
Vaamonde also designed the Lagunillas Craft Training Center (1953).
On 7 November 2015 a magnitude 5.3 earthquake occurred SSE of Lagunillas at a depth of .
Another 5.3 magnitude earthquake occurred on 22 November 2015 NNW of Lagunillas at a depth of .
Notes
Sources
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:
Cities in Mérida (state)