Mérida & the Andes

The Andean valleys were home to the Timoto-Cuica peoples, farmers who terraced and irrigated the slopes. Spanish captains came over the mountains from New Granada, and Mérida was founded in 1558 and San Cristóbal in 1561. For much of the colonial era the Andes were governed from Bogotá rather than Caracas, and a seminary founded in Mérida in 1785 became the University of the Andes in 1810.

Independence came fiercely here. In 1813 Bolívar crossed from New Granada on his Admirable Campaign, marched through Mérida and issued the decree of "war to the death" in the town of Trujillo. At Santa Ana de Trujillo in 1820 he met the Spanish commander Pablo Morillo to agree an armistice.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries coffee made the Andes prosperous, and Táchira produced a line of presidents — Cipriano Castro, Juan Vicente Gómez, and later Marcos Pérez Jiménez among them — who ruled Venezuela for much of the half-century after 1899. Barinas, on the plains below, is the home state of Hugo Chávez, born in Sabaneta in 1954, and his family long held its governorship. San Cristóbal was a centre of the 2014 street protests, and the closures and reopenings of the Colombian border since then have shaped Táchira's economy.

Andinos are seen by other Venezuelans as reserved, formal and hard-working, and their Spanish is slower and more careful. Catholicism runs deeper here than on the coast. The best-known custom is the Paradura del Niño, when families "stand up" the figure of the infant Jesus in the Christmas crib, with prayers, songs and processions, from January into early February. Mérida honours the Virgin of Candelaria on 2 February with the dances of the Vasallos de la Candelaria.

Trujillo's most loved figure is José Gregorio Hernández, a doctor born in Isnotú in 1864 who treated the poor of Caracas and died in 1919; he was declared a saint of the Catholic Church in 2025, and his image is everywhere in Venezuelan homes. The páramo has its own crafts and its own breed of dog, the Mucuchíes, a national symbol.

Mérida is a student city, and the University of the Andes still sets its tone: bookshops, cheap cafés, mountain sports and a politically active campus. The Feria del Sol, held in early February, brings concerts and bullfights.

Mérida has a few hundred thousand people in its metropolitan area, and San Cristóbal is the other large Andean city. Barinas is the main city of the plains' edge, and Valera and Trujillo are the centres of Trujillo state. In the páramo, villages like Mucuchíes and Apartaderos are small farming communities.

The mountains grow potatoes, carrots, garlic and other vegetables for the whole country on steep terraced fields, along with coffee lower down; trout are farmed in the cold streams, and Barinas raises cattle and pumps oil. Tourism, once a big earner around Mérida, fell sharply during the crisis. In Táchira, life is tied to the border: when it is open, people cross daily to Cúcuta in Colombia to shop, work and study.

The Andean states have suffered some of the country's longest power cuts and fuel queues, which has pushed many young people to emigrate, often overland into Colombia. Days begin early and cold in the mountains, with work in the fields at dawn and villages quiet after dark.

The Andean breakfast is the pisca andina, a broth of potatoes, egg, spring onion and coriander, eaten with the arepa de trigo, a small, dense wheat-flour arepa unlike the maize arepa of the rest of the country. Farmed trout is the regional fish, cooked in many ways, and pastelitos, fried pastries, come filled with spiced meat.

Andean cheeses include fresh white cheese and smoked queso ahumado, and the region is famous for sweets: Mérida's dulces abrillantados, sugar-glazed figures of milk fudge sold in bright colours, and the stalls of the Mercado Principal. Mérida's Heladería Coromoto became known for offering hundreds of ice-cream flavours, some made with unusual ingredients such as avocado. The traditional drink is miche, the Andean spirit, taken against the cold. On the Barinas plains the food turns llanero, with carne en vara, beef roasted on stakes over an open fire.

Mérida lies on a terrace above the Chama river with the Sierra Nevada rising behind it. The Mukumbarí cable car, rebuilt and reopened in 2016 on the line of the 1960 original, climbs in stages from the city to Pico Espejo at about 4,700 metres, the base for climbs of Pico Bolívar, Venezuela's highest mountain, and Pico Humboldt, whose glacier was the country's last. The Sierra Nevada National Park covers these peaks, and the Sierra de la Culata National Park faces them across the valley.

The trans-Andean road climbs north-east from Mérida through the páramo villages — Tabay, Mucurubá, Mucuchíes, San Rafael de Mucuchíes with its stone chapel, and Apartaderos — to Laguna de Mucubají and the pass at Pico El Águila, over 4,000 metres, among fields of frailejón. Los Nevados, a village reached by rough track, and Jají, a restored colonial village west of Mérida, are the other classic excursions.

In Trujillo, the monument to the Virgen de la Paz stands on a hill above the town, and Isnotú draws pilgrims to José Gregorio Hernández's birthplace; Boconó is a garden town in the coffee hills. San Cristóbal, Táchira's capital, is a busy commercial city of hills and parks. East of the mountains, the road drops to Barinas and the edge of the plains, where the Santo Domingo river runs down from the páramo into cattle country.