Francisco Fajardo, the son of a Spanish captain and a Guaiqueri cacica, who came from Margarita, began establishing settlements in the area of La Guaira and the Caracas valley between 1555 and 1560.

Fajardo attempted to establish a plantation in the valley in 1562 after these unsuccessful coastal towns, but it did not last long: it was destroyed by natives of the region led by Terepaima and Guaicaipuro.

Moving eastward from Coro, groups of Spanish settlers founded inland towns including Barquisimeto and Valencia before reaching the Caracas valley.

[10] De Losada had been commissioned to capture the valley, and was successful by splitting the natives into different groups to work with, then fighting and defeating each of them.

[13] In the 1580s, Caraqueños started selling food to the Spanish soldiers in Cartagena, who often docked in the coastal city when collecting products from the empire in South America.

[13] In the 1620s, farmers in Caracas discovered that Cacao beans could be sold, first selling them to native people of Mexico and quickly growing across the Caribbean.

[13][18] Urban reforms only took place towards the end of the 19th century, under Antonio Guzmán Blanco: some landmarks were built, but the city remained distinctly colonial until the 1930s.

In the 1950s, the metropolitan area of Gran Caracas was developed, and the city began an intensive modernization program, funding public buildings, which continued throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

Much of the city development also fell into disrepair come the end of the 20th century, with the 1980s oil glut and political instability like the Caracazo, meaning maintenance can not be sustained.

[21] In 1591, de Bolívar introduced a petition to King Philip II for a coat of arms, which he granted by Royal Cedula on 4 September that year in San Lorenzo.

[23] The anthem of the city is the Marcha a Caracas, written by the composer Tiero Pezzuti de Matteis with the lyrics by José Enrique Sarabia and approved in 1984.

[24] Caracas is contained entirely within a valley of the Venezuelan Central Range, and is separated from the Caribbean coast by a roughly 15-kilometer (9 mi) expanse of El Ávila National Park.

Electrical storms are much more frequent, especially between June and October, due to the city being in a closed valley and the orographic action of Cerro El Ávila.

Among the characteristics of the hydrographic network associated with the city of Caracas is the high degree of contamination present in the lower parts of the Guaire River due to its tributaries having been used for sewage collection since 1874, during the government of Antonio Guzmán Blanco, until today.

The "Ezequiel Zamora" Central Railway System also links the communities of Charallave and Cúa de los Valles del Tuy with the subway transportation of the capital city.

The majority of the population is mixed-race, typically with varying degrees of European, Indigenous, African and occasional Asian ancestry.

[39] Caracas has exceeded the administrative limits of its perimeter due to accelerated population growth, so that its most suitable demographic study territory is the Metropolitan District or AMC.

[citation needed] Between the 1940s and 1950s, after the Second World War, a growing wave of European immigrants began, mostly Spanish, Portuguese and Italians and in other magnitudes, communities of Germans (Colonia Tovar), French, English, Serbs and Jews were established.

During the 1960s, President Rómulo Betancourt followed the same policy as the Marcos Pérez Jiménez government: promoting immigration, especially from Latin America and from other parts of the world.

These policies were maintained until the late 1980s, with a notable influx of Argentines, Uruguayans, Chileans, Cubans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Chinese, and Arabs.

[50][51][52] The U.S. Department of State and British Foreign and Commonwealth Office have issued travel warnings for Venezuela due to high rates of crime.

PDVSA, a state-run organization, is the largest company in Venezuela,[55] and negotiates all the international agreements for the distribution and export of petroleum.

[64] On 8 March 2000, the year after a new constitution was introduced in Venezuela, it was decreed in Gaceta Official N° 36,906 that the Metropolitan District of Caracas would be created and that some of the powers of the Libertador, Chacao, Baruta, Sucre, and El Hatillo municipalities would be delegated to the Alcaldía Mayor, physically located in the large Libertador municipality, in the center of the city.

The city of Caracas occupies the entirety of the Libertador municipality of the Capital District and part of the state of Miranda, specifically the municipalities of Baruta, Chacao, El Hatillo and Sucre, which until 2011 formed the Metropolitan District of Caracas, which enjoyed legal personality and autonomy within the limits of the Constitution and the law.

The city is home to many immigrants from Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Middle East, Germany, China, and other Latin American countries.

In basketball, the Cocodrilos de Caracas play their games in the Gimnasio José Beracasa in the El Paraíso neighborhood.

Other transportation services include the IFE train to and from the Tuy Valley cities of Charallave and Cúa; the Simón Bolívar International Airport, the biggest and most important in the country; the metro additional services Caracas Aerial Tramway and Los Teques Metro (connecting Caracas with the suburban city of Los Teques); and the Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base used by military aviation and government airplanes.

[citation needed] Currently, a link is being built that will connect the Central Regional highway (at km 31) with the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho highway (Kempis sector), in order to serve as a spillway to the city of Caracas and neighboring Guarenas and Guatire, so that vehicles that go from east to west or center, and vice versa, do not have the need to enter Caracas.

The route of this highway would be from the vicinity of the Charallave airport, passing through Santa Lucía and going up to the Kempis area (between Guatire and Caucagua).

In 2011, a new metrocable system was built in the Parroquia de San Agustín del Sur, where people can freely go and enjoy a view of a large part of Caracas.