Puerto La Cruz

The coast of Pozuelos Bay was Cumanagoto country when the Spanish arrived, and a Christian mission was founded at Pozuelos in 1780. The city itself began on 9 April 1862, when 26 families from Margarita Island settled on the bay to fish and farm. The settlers took the Virgen del Amparo as their patron and the Holy Cross as their emblem; by 1868 they had built their first church, and the village came to be called Puerto de la Santa Cruz, later shortened to Puerto La Cruz.

Oil transformed it. In 1939 the Mene Grande Oil Company, a Gulf Oil subsidiary, laid a pipeline from its Oficina field to the bay, Creole Petroleum followed from its Jusepín field, and Socony-Vacuum added a line in 1947. In 1950 Mene Grande and the Venezuelan subsidiary of Sinclair Oil each built a refinery. Puerto La Cruz became the main concentration of oil installations in the east, its population grew fast, and thousands of immigrants, mostly European and Asian, arrived and opened businesses.

With the crude came tourism: the seafront, the ferries to Margarita and the islands of Mochima, declared a national park, made the city a holiday base for Venezuelans. In 2011 the government took over Conferry, the main ferry company. A metro for the Barcelona–Puerto La Cruz area was announced in 2007, but the project stalled. In recent years the national crisis, fuel shortages and the decline of the oil industry have weighed heavily on the city.

Puerto La Cruz is an oriental city, with the fast, clipped Spanish of eastern Venezuela and a culture shaped by the sea. Its founders came from Margarita, and the island's devotions and music — the galerón and malagueña, sung in improvised verses — run through the region. The city's two feasts, the Holy Cross on 3 May and the Virgen del Amparo on 8 November, date back to those first settlers.

The oil boom made it more cosmopolitan than many Venezuelan towns. Families of European and Asian origin opened businesses, and people of Arab descent run much of the trade on Avenida 5 de Julio. Universities across the urban area, among them the Anzoátegui campus of the Universidad de Oriente, give it a student population.

Life looks outward to the water. The Paseo Colón, with its cross and boulevard, is where people walk, meet and watch the sunset over the bay, and weekends and holidays mean a boat to the islands of Mochima or a drive along the coast to beaches such as Playa Colorada. Baseball is followed here as across the country.

Puerto La Cruz had about 380,000 people in 2023, and together with Barcelona, Lechería and Guanta it forms one of Venezuela's larger urban areas, with a population of about 950,000. It is the seat of the Juan Antonio Sotillo municipality.

The city's refinery, one of the largest in the country with a capacity of 200,000 barrels a day, and the pipelines that end here from the oilfields of Anzoátegui and Monagas are the backbone of the economy, along with the oil export terminal at Guaraguao. Tourism, ferries, banks with regional offices and shopping centres provide much of the rest. Under the crisis the oil industry has declined, and power and water cuts, fuel shortages and emigration have marked daily life.

The city's day starts early along the bay, where boatmen wait at the piers for passengers to the islands. The commercial streets of the centre are busiest in the morning, and the seafront fills again in the evening once the heat eases.

Puerto La Cruz eats like the rest of the eastern coast, from the sea. The standard meal is fried fish with tostones, flattened twice-fried green plantain, and hervido de pescado, a fish soup with cassava, pumpkin and green plantain, is the other standard coastal meal. The founders' Margarita brought cazón, young shark, stewed and shredded for empanadas and bakes, and pastel de chucho, a layered bake of stingray, ripe plantain and cheese, is found along this coast too.

Coconut appears in drinks and sweets, and the cacao of Paria and Sucre, further east, is some of Venezuela's finest. Across the city people eat the national staples: arepas split and stuffed with cheese, shredded beef or black beans; pabellón criollo of shredded beef, black beans, rice and fried plantain; cachapas, fresh-corn pancakes eaten with soft white cheese; and, at Christmas, hallacas wrapped in plantain leaf. Strong black coffee is drunk through the day, and papelón con limón, a raw-sugar lemonade, is drunk in the hottest hours of the day.