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Updated: June 10, 2025
But for this rocky dyke, the isthmus itself in all probability would have had no existence; and from the castle of Araya as far as Cape Paria, the whole mass of the mountains of the coast would have formed a narrow island, parallel to the island of Santa Margareta, and four times as long.
It forms the mountain of the castle of San Antonio near the town of Cumana, the south-west extremity of the peninsula of Araya, the Cerro Meapire, south of Caraco and the vicinity of Porto Cabello. These banks of clay appeared to me constantly to form the lower strata.
But the irruptions of the Caribbean Sea having apparently overwhelmed, at a very remote period, a part of the mountains of the shore, the ranges or partial chains are interrupted and some basins have become oceanic gulfs. That island, those of Los Testigos, Marguerita and Tortuga constitute, with the mica-slates of the peninsula of Araya, one and the same system of mountains.
In spite of this aridity, and the scarcity of rain, of which sometimes none falls for the space of fifteen months,* the peninsula of Araya, like the desert of Canound in India, produces patillas, or water-melons, weighing from fifty to seventy pounds. The same author, who died in 1526, affirms that the Indians wrought the salt-works before the arrival of the Spaniards.
As the Cerro de la Vela, the Brigantine, and the castle of San Antonio at Cumana, are equally visible from the Punta Arenas, situated to the west of the village of Maniquarez, the same objects were available for an approximate determination of the respective positions of several points, which are laid down in the mineralogical chart of the peninsula of Araya.
The indications of both ochreous and magnetic iron in the coast-chain, the native alum of Chuparipari, the salt of Araya, the kaolin of the Silla, the jade of the Upper Orinoco, the petroleum of Buen-Pastor and the sulphur of the eastern part of New Andalusia equally merit the attention of the government.
Its western extremity is opposite to a range of islands connected by bridges, and so close together that they might be taken for another neck of land. These islands are all composed of a calcareous breccia of extremely recent formation, and analagous to that on the coast of Cumana, and near the castle of Araya.
I say apparent dryness, for my hygrometric observations prove that the atmosphere of Cumana and Araya contains nearly nine-tenths of the quantity of watery vapour necessary to its perfect saturation. It is this air, at once hot and humid, that nourishes those vegetable reservoirs, the cucurbitaceous plants, the agaves and melocactuses half-buried in the sand.
If, in the sketch of the formations of Venezuela, I had followed the received division into primitive, intermediary, secondary and tertiary strata, I might be doubtful what place the last stratum of mica-slate in the peninsula of Araya should occupy.
Farther to the south, the vast gulf Cariaco stretches away, like a longitudinal valley formed by the irruption of the sea, between the two small chains of Araya and the Cocollar, between the mica-slate and the Alpine limestone. We shall soon see that the direction of the strata, very regular in the first of these rocks, is not quite parallel with the general direction of the gulf.
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