Villavicencio

Villavicencio (biʎaβiˈsensjo) is a city and municipality in Colombia. The capital of Meta Department, it was founded on April 6, 1840. The municipality had a population of 531,275 in 2018. The city is located at 4°08'N, 73°40'W, 75 km (about 45 mi) southeast of the Colombian capital city of Bogotá (DC) by the Guatiquía River. It is the most important commercial center in the Llanos Orientales (Eastern plains) of Colombia. Villavicencio has a warm and humid climate, with average daily temperatures ranging from 21 °C to 30 °C.2 It is affectionately called "Villavo" la bella. Lying in a rural zone of tropical climate, Villavicencio is on the great Colombian-Venezuelan plain called the Llanos, situated to the east of the Andes mountains. Villavicencio is also called "La Puerta al Llano", or "The Gateway to the Plains", due to its location on the historical path from the Colombian interior to the vast savannas that lie between the Andes range and the Amazon rainforest. Villavicencio's proximity to huge mountains and great plains make the city an example of Colombia's geodiversity. Because it is located in the foothills of the Andes, the morning and evening breezes cool the city, which is very hot for most of the day. The German Conquistador Nikolaus Federmann reached the altiplano of Bogotá in 1536 by approaching it from the plains of Venezuela, a large unsettled area that is formed by the Orinoco basin. However, the vast area of these plains remained unexplored and uncolonized for the next 300 years. Colombia was settled along the mountainous folds of the Magdalena and Cauca valleys, and its commerce with the outside world was oriented towards the Caribbean Sea, thus, because of its mountainous barriers, the extreme heat, and inhospitable climate, the Llanos remained forgotten and unsettled for many decades. The Llaneros, the inhabitants of the plains, are fierce horsemen who first fought for the Spanish royalists and then for the Venezuelan and Colombian rebels during the War of Independence.

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Related concepts (3)

Llanos

The Llanos (Spanish Los Llanos, "The Plains"; los ˈʝanos) is a vast tropical grassland plain situated to the east of the Andes in Colombia and Venezuela, in northwestern South America. It is an ecoregion of the tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome. The Llanos occupy a lowland that extends mostly east and west. The Llanos are bounded on the west and northwest by the Andes, and on the north by the Venezuelan Coastal Range. The Guiana Highlands are to the southeast, and the Negro-Branco moist forests are to the southwest.

Orinoco crocodile

The Orinoco crocodile (Crocodylus intermedius) is a critically endangered crocodile. Its population is very small, and they can only be found in the Orinoco river basin in Venezuela and Colombia. Extensively hunted for their skins in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is one of the most endangered species of crocodiles. It is a very large species of crocodilian; males have been reported up to in the past, weighing over , but such sizes do not exist today, being a more widely accepted maximum size.

Orinoco

The Orinoco (oɾiˈnoko) is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers , with 76.3 percent of it in Venezuela and the remainder in Colombia. It is the fourth largest river in the world by discharge volume of water. The Orinoco River and its tributaries are the major transportation system for eastern and interior Venezuela and the Llanos of Colombia. The environment and wildlife in the Orinoco's basin are extremely diverse.