Caracas

Caracas lies in a narrow valley at nine hundred metres with the wall of the Ávila rising more than a thousand metres straight up on its northern side, separating the city from the sea. A cable car climbs it in fifteen minutes to a ridge with the whole valley on one side and the Caribbean on the other. The Ciudad Universitaria was designed by Carlos Raúl Villanueva as a single work of modern architecture woven through with murals and sculpture, and UNESCO listed it in 2000. Bolívar is buried in the National Pantheon above the colonial centre. The metro opened in 1983 and still carries the city.