Valencia

Valencia is the third city of Venezuela and its industrial heart, set on a plain between the coastal range and the lake of the same name. Thirty kilometres south-west is the Campo de Carabobo, where Bolívar broke the royalist army on the twenty-fourth of June 1821 and effectively ended Spanish rule, and a triumphal arch and a monument to the fallen stand on the field. The bullring built in 1968 seats close to twenty-five thousand and is the second largest in the world. Humboldt bathed in the hot springs at Las Trincheras north of the city in 1800. The city runs a metro of its own, opened in 2006.