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Lara-Falcón Highlands |
Situated in northwestern Venezuela, the Lara-Falcón Highlands exhibit a terrain defined by plateaus and rolling hills. These highlands provide a significant contrast to the surrounding lowlands and coastal areas. The relief is characterized by gently sloping plateaus that support agriculture, including coffee and cacao cultivation. This region's semi-arid climate and picturesque landscapes make it an important agricultural and tourism center. |
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Lake Maracaibo Lowlands |
Encompass the basin of Lake Maracaibo and the plains surrounding the Gulf of Venezuela. This region offers two distinct plains—the northern one is relatively dry, while the southern one is humid and dotted with swamps. The relief here is primarily characterized by flat terrain, with the exception of some elevated areas near the lake. Lake Maracaibo itself sits in a depression, surrounded by oil-rich lands and productive agricultural areas. |
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The Andes |
The Venezuelan Andes, part of the broader Andes mountain range, offer a striking relief with towering peaks, deep valleys, and fertile intermontane basins. Dominated by these corpulent mountain ranges, including Venezuela's highest peak, Bolívar Peak, the region's rugged and picturesque landscapes are defined by its high-altitude terrain. |
The unique relief of this area finds its origins in the Last Glacial Period, where the interplay of repeated glacier advances and retreats sculpted the landscape, shaped by the cold, high-altitude climate. This glacial heritage has left a lasting imprint, with glaciers carving deep valleys and polishing rugged peaks, while sheltered intramontane valleys offer fertile soils and temperate microclimates, creating ideal conditions for agriculture and human settlement. |
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Los Llanos |
Los Llanos, or "the plains", are expansive sedimentary basins characterized by predominantly flat relief. However, the eastern Llanos feature low-plateaus and the Unare depression, created through mesa erosion, adding diversity to the terrain. This region is subject to seasonal flooding, transforming the flat plains into a vast wetland during the rainy season. The relief here influences the region's unique ecosystems, including extensive grasslands and abundant wildlife. |
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Guiana Shield |
The Guiana Shield boasts a varied relief shaped by geological processes over millions of years. This region encompasses peneplains, rugged mountain ranges, foothills, and the iconic tepuis, or table-top mountains. The tepuis stand as isolated, flat-topped plateaus that rise dramatically from the surrounding terrain. This unique relief contributes to the region's remarkable biodiversity and scientific significance. |
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Orinoco Delta |
The Orinoco Delta's relief is characterized by a complex system of lands and waters. It consists of numerous channels, islands, and shifting sedimentary deposits. While the relief may appear relatively uniform, it conceals a dynamic environment influenced by seasonal flooding and sediment deposition. This complex deltaic relief supports diverse aquatic life and the livelihoods of Indigenous communities adapted to its ever-changing landscapes. |
Valleys |
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The valleys are undoubtedly the most important type of landscape in the Venezuelan territory, not because of their spatial extension, but because they are the environment where most of the country's population and economic activities are concentrated. On the other hand, there are valleys throughout almost all the national space, except in the great sedimentary basins of the Llanos and the depression of the Maracaibo Lake, except also in the Amazonian peneplains. By their modeling, the valleys of the Venezuelan territory belong mainly to two types: valleys of fluvial type and valleys of glacial type. Much more frequent, the former largely dominate the latter, which are restricted to the highest parts of the Andes. Moreover, most glacial valleys are relics of a past geologic epoch, which culminated some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. |
The deep and narrow Andean valleys are very different from the wide depressions of Aragua and Carabobo, in the Cordillera de la Costa, or from the valleys nestled in the Mesas de Monagas. These examples indicate that the configuration of the local relief is decisive in identifying regional types of valleys. Likewise, due to their warm climate, the Guayana valleys are distinguished from the temperate or cold Andean valleys by their humid environment. Both are, in turn, different from the semi-arid depressions of the states of Lara and Falcón. |
The Andean valleys, essentially agricultural, precociously populated but nowadays in loss of speed, do not confront the same problems of space occupation as the strongly urbanized and industrialized valleys of the central section of the Cordillera de la Costa. On the other hand, the unpopulated and practically untouched Guiana valleys are another category this area is called the Lost World (Mundo Perdido). |
The Andean valleys are undoubtedly the most impressive of the Venezuelan territory because of the energy of the encasing reliefs, whose summits often dominate the valley bottoms by 3,000 to 3,500 meters of relative altitude. They are also the most picturesque in terms of their style of habitat, forms of land use, handicraft production and all the traditions linked to these activities. |
Deserts |
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Venezuela has a great diversity of landscapes and climates, including arid and dry areas. The main desert in the country is in the state of Falcon near the city of Coro. It is now a protected park, the Médanos de Coro National Park. The park is the largest of its kind in Venezuela, covering 91 square kilometres. The landscape is dotted with cacti and other xerophytic plants that can survive in humidity-free conditions near the desert. |
Desert wildlife includes mostly lizards, iguanas and other reptiles. Although less frequent, the desert is home to some foxes, giant anteaters and rabbits. There are also some native bird populations, such as the sparrowhawk, tropical mockingbird, scaly dove and crested quail. |
Other desert areas in the country include part of the Guajira Desert in the Guajira Municipality in the north of Zulia State and facing the Gulf of Venezuela, the Médanos de Capanaparo in the Santos Luzardo National Park in Apure State, the Medanos de la Isla de Zapara in Zulia State, the so-called Hundición de Yay in the Andrés Eloy Blanco Municipality of Lara State, and the Urumaco Formation also in Falcón State. |
Government and politics |
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Two major blocs of political parties are in Venezuela: the incumbent leftist bloc United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), its major allies Fatherland for All (PPT) and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), and the opposition bloc grouped into the electoral coalition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática. This includes A New Era (UNT) together with allied parties Project Venezuela, Justice First, Movement for Socialism (MAS) and others. |
The Venezuelan president is elected by a vote, with direct and universal suffrage, and is both head of state and head of government. The term of office is six years. As of February 2009, a president may be re-elected an unlimited number of times. The president appoints the vice president and decides the size and composition of the cabinet and makes appointments to it with the involvement of the legislature. The president can ask the legislature to reconsider portions of laws he finds objectionable, but a simple parliamentary majority can override these objections. |
The president may ask the National Assembly to pass an enabling act granting the ability to rule by decree in specified policy areas. This requires a two-thirds majority in the Assembly. Since 1959, six Venezuelan presidents have been granted such powers. |
The unicameral Venezuelan parliament is the Asamblea Nacional ("National Assembly"). The number of members is variable – each state and the Capital district elect three representatives, plus the result of dividing the state population by 1.1% of the population of the country. Three seats are reserved for representatives of Venezuela's Indigenous peoples. For the 2011–2016 period the number of seats is 165. All deputies serve five-year terms. |
The voting age in Venezuela is 18. Voting is not compulsory. |
The legal system of Venezuela belongs to the Continental Law tradition. The highest judicial body is the Supreme Tribunal of Justice or Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, whose magistrates are elected by parliament for a single twelve-year term. The National Electoral Council (Consejo Nacional Electoral, or CNE) is in charge of electoral processes. It is formed by five main directors elected by the National Assembly. Supreme Court president Luisa Estela Morales said in December 2009 that Venezuela had moved away from "a rigid division of powers" toward a system characterized by "intense coordination" between the branches of government. Morales clarified that each power must be independent. |
In 2006, the Economist Intelligence Unit rated Venezuela an hybrid regime and the third least democratic regime in Latin America on the Democracy Index. The Democracy Index downgraded Venezuela to an authoritarian regime in 2017, citing continued increasingly dictatorial behaviors by the Maduro government. The Regimes of the World index rated Venezuela as an electoral autocracy in 2024. |
Administrative divisions |
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Venezuela is divided into 23 states (estados), a capital district (distrito capital) for Caracas, and the Federal Dependencies (Dependencias Federales, a special territory). Venezuela is subdivided into 335 municipalities (municipios). These are subdivided into over one thousand parishes (parroquias). The states are grouped into nine administrative regions (regiones administrativas), which were established in 1969 by presidential decree. |
Venezuela can be further divided into ten geographical areas, some corresponding to climatic and biogeographical regions. In the north are the Venezuelan Andes. The Coro region, a mountainous tract in the northwest, holds several sierras and valleys. East of it are lowlands abutting Lake Maracaibo and the Gulf of Venezuela. |
The Central Range runs parallel to the coast and includes the hills surrounding Caracas; the Eastern Range, separated from the Central Range by the Gulf of Cariaco, covers all of Sucre and northern Monagas. The Insular Region includes all of Venezuela's island possessions: Nueva Esparta and the various Federal Dependencies. The Orinoco Delta, which forms a triangle covering Delta Amacuro, projects northeast into the Atlantic Ocean. |
Venezuela maintains a claim on the territory it calls "Guayana Esequiba", the territory administered by Guyana west of the Esequibo River. In 1966, the British and Venezuelan governments signed the Geneva Agreement to resolve the conflict peacefully. The Port of Spain Protocol of 1970 set a deadline to try to resolve the issue, without success to date. |
Suspension of constitutional rights |
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The 2015 parliamentary elections were held on 6 December 2015 to elect the 164 deputies and three Indigenous representatives of the National Assembly. In 2014, a series of protest and demonstrations began in Venezuela, attributed to inflation, violence and shortages in Venezuela. The protests were largely peaceful. The government has accused the protest of being motivated by fascists, opposition leaders, capitalism and foreign influence, President Maduro acknowledged PSUV defeat but attributed the opposition's victory to an intensification of an economic war. Despite this, Maduro said, "I will stop by hook or by crook the opposition coming to power, whatever the costs, in any way". |
In the following months, Maduro fulfilled his promise of preventing the elected National Assembly from legislating. The first steps taken by PSUV and government were the substitution of the entire Supreme Court a day after the parliamentary elections, contrary to the Constitution of Venezuela, acclaimed as a fraud by the majority of the Venezuelan and international press. The Financial Times described the function of the Supreme Court in Venezuela as "rubber stamping executive whims and vetoing legislation". The PSUV government used this violation to suspend several elected opponents. Maduro said that "the Amnesty law (approved by the Parliament) will not be executed" and asked the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. |
On 16 January 2016, Maduro approved an unconstitutional economic emergency decree, relegating to his own figure the legislative and executive powers, while also holding judiciary power through the fraudulent designation of judges the day after the election on 6 December 2015. From these events, Maduro effectively controls all three branches of government. On 14 May 2016, constitutional guarantees were suspended when Maduro decreed the extension of the economic emergency decree for another 60 days and declared a State of Emergency, which is a clear violation of the Constitution of Venezuela in the Article 338th: "The approval of the extension of States of emergency corresponds to the National Assembly." Thus, constitutional rights in Venezuela are considered suspended by many publications and public figures. |
On 14 May 2016, the Organization of American States was considering the application of the Inter-American Democratic Charter sanctions for non-compliance to its own constitution. |
In March 2017, the Venezuelan Supreme Court took over law making powers from the National Assembly but reversed its decision the following day. |
Foreign relations |
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