Caracas holds Latin America's boldest experiment in modern art fused with architecture: Villanueva's UNESCO university campus, Cruz-Diez's colour underfoot, and a free national museum cluster where Reverón and Botero hang metres apart.
Carlos Raúl Villanueva's 1940s-50s campus, UNESCO-listed since 2000, weaves Léger, Arp, Vasarely and Calder's floating 'Nubes' acoustic clouds into concrete walkways. Open weekdays; guided architecture tours leave from the Aula Magna foyer.
Founded 1973 by Sofía Ímber, still the strongest modern collection in the country: Picasso, Léger, Matta, Botero's 'Rapto de Europa' and a full Soto room. Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, inside the Parque Central towers complex.
Two Villanueva-designed buildings facing Parque Los Caobos. The GAN holds five centuries of Venezuelan work — Armando Reverón's white-period canvases, Michelena's history paintings — while Bellas Artes covers Egyptian and European holdings.
Carlos Cruz-Diez covered Caracas in 'Physichromie' colour — the Los Caobos plaza paving, the Bellas Artes forecourt and the airport's famous floor all use his additive-colour stripes. Late light makes the interference effect strongest.
The 1881 Guzmán Blanco-era opera house in the historic centre, Italianate horseshoe with painted ceiling, restored and still staging opera and zarzuela. Daytime access depends on rehearsals; the box office knows the week's schedule.
Behind the cathedral, the Museo Sacro occupies a colonial ecclesiastical building with an ossuary crypt, colonial santos carvings and a courtyard café — the least touristed serious museum in the old centre.
Dedicated to the kinetic pioneer whose 'Coloritmos' hang beside his monumental 'Abra Solar'. The museum sits by the Parque Los Símbolos and holds rotating shows of younger Venezuelan sculptors.
Home of El Sistema and the Sala Simón Bolívar, where the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra rehearses. Evening concerts are frequent and cheap; the acoustic hall was purpose-built in 2007 for the youth orchestra programme.
Petare's colonial core — a whitewashed 18th-century grid around the Iglesia Dulce Nombre de Jesús — houses a folk-art museum of devotional carving, ceramics and Carnival masks from across Venezuela.
A converted warehouse complex holding half a dozen commercial galleries — Galería Freites among them — plus artisan food stalls. This is where the contemporary Caracas market actually trades.
A 1797 coffee-plantation house in San Bernardino, furnished as a Caracas patrician home with period furniture, a chapel and slave quarters. Chamber concerts run in the courtyard on Sunday mornings.
An underground arts complex with art-house cinemas, two theatre stages, a gallery and a bar — the reliable evening centre of the city's cultural life, running festivals and independent Venezuelan theatre year-round.