Caracas is where Simón Bolívar was born, where Venezuela declared independence in 1811, and where oil money rebuilt a colonial town into a modernist experiment. Three days trace that arc: 18th-century courtyards, the 1811 Congress, and Villanueva's concrete campus.
Bolívar's 1783 birth-house on the Plaza San Jacinto block, rebuilt in 1921 with Tito Salas murals of his campaigns. Colonial courtyards, the family's original well and period furniture. Open Tue–Sun 09:00–16:00; free entry, ID required at the door.
A working-day lunch spot two blocks off Plaza Bolívar serving pabellón criollo and sopa de res to office staff and museum guards. Cash bolívares or US dollars accepted; menú ejecutivo runs roughly 200–350 Bs depending on the week's rate.
The Palacio de las Academias occupies the 1577 San Francisco convent, rebuilt in neo-Gothic in 1876 — Venezuela's first university sat here from 1725. The Casa Amarilla opposite was the colonial royal prison, then the governor's residence.
The oldest surviving church interior in Caracas, founded 1575, with baroque gilded altarpieces that escaped the 1812 earthquake. Bolívar was proclaimed Libertador here in 1813 and his 1842 state funeral was held under this nave.
The 1874 conversion of the Santísima Trinidad church into Venezuela's national mausoleum, holding Bolívar's sarcophagus under Tito Salas ceiling murals. The 2013 Arco addition by Chávez rises beside it. Tue–Sun, honour guard changes hourly.
Guzmán Blanco built this domed legislature in 1873 on a confiscated convent site, reportedly in 114 days. The Salón Elíptico holds Martín Tovar y Tovar's ceiling painting of the Battle of Carabobo and the original 1811 independence act.
Carlos Raúl Villanueva's 1940s–60s campus, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2000 and the built expression of oil-boom modernism. The Aula Magna carries Alexander Calder's floating acoustic 'clouds'; the covered walkways integrate Léger and Arp.
The barracks Chávez attacked in the failed 1992 coup, now his mausoleum with a 24-hour guard and a cannon fired at 16:25 daily. It sits inside 23 de Enero, the 1950s Villanueva superblocks built under dictator Pérez Jiménez.
A 1797 coffee-hacienda house in San Bernardino, the only intact colonial country estate left in Caracas. Rooms are furnished as they stood around 1810; Humboldt-era botanical gardens and the original slave quarters survive at the rear.
An 18th-century Spanish barracks turned political prison — guerrillas tunnelled out of it in 1967 in one of Venezuela's famous escapes. Thick stone cells, the parade yard and displays on the 1958 fall of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship.
Founded 1745 on the northern edge of the colonial grid, La Pastora keeps low tile-roofed houses, iron window grilles and the Iglesia de la Divina Pastora. It was working-class Caracas before the oil boom pushed the wealthy east.
Caracas's oldest public park, laid out on a 19th-century coffee plantation, edged by the 1930s neoclassical Museo de Ciencias and the 1970s Parque Central towers — three eras of the city's ambition standing within sight of each other.