Plaza Bolívar
Start where Caracas itself started. When the city was founded as Santiago de León de Caracas in 1567, this square sat at the centre of its first 25 blocks and was planned as the Plaza Mayor, the town's marketplace. Look around the edges and you can read the city's power map: the cathedral, the Sacred Museum, the Archbishop's Palace, City Hall, the Chapel of Santa Rosa de Lima, the Yellow House, the Main Theater and the seat of the Capital District government all face the square.
Its history is not all gentle. Under Spanish rule this was where political enemies and conspirators were shot and executed; the case people remember is José María España, whose body was quartered here in 1799. Eleven years later, on 19 April 1810, a popular rebellion against the Spanish crown rose on this same ground, Venezuela's first move towards independence.
The name came late. After independence it was the Plaza de Armas and the Plaza del Mercado; only when Bolívar's body arrived from Santa Marta was it formally named Plaza Bolívar in 1842, and the name did not really stick until 1874. In 1754 Governor Felipe Ricardos had wrapped the square in arcades. General Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who took the presidency in 1865, tore them down and moved the market vendors out, and he is also the man behind the equestrian statue of Bolívar in the middle. A detail locals like to correct: this is not the country's biggest Plaza Bolívar, that title goes to Maracay.
The square is open around the clock and free, so give it fifteen minutes now; you come back to its edge at the very end, at the cathedral. The Iglesia de San Francisco is only 280 m away, about 3 minutes on foot.
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