Calabozo

Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Calabozo in 1800 and spent weeks there, captivated by a local physician named Carlos del Pozo who had built a primitive electrical apparatus using the organs of the electric eel — the Electrophorus electricus that inhabits these river systems in significant numbers. Humboldt wrote about it at length and with barely suppressed excitement, which is the most Humboldt response possible. I thought about this when I arrived in Calabozo two centuries later, looking for the same combination of scientific strangeness and landscape that had caught the great naturalist’s attention. The town is quieter now than in Humboldt’s description, the heat as absolute as he reported, and the rivers still hold their eels, though I was not foolish enough to go in after them.

Calabozo sits in Guárico state, roughly at the geographical centre of the Venezuelan Llanos, which gives it a slightly different character from the Apure hatos to the south and west. The surrounding landscape is lower and drier in the dry season, the scrub thicker in places, the transition from savanna to gallery forest more abrupt. The city itself — about 100,000 people, a hospital, a university campus, several decent restaurants — functions as the regional centre for the central Llanos in the way that San Fernando serves Apure: a place where the logistics of the surrounding wilderness get resolved.

The Embalse de Calabozo, the large reservoir created by the Guárico Dam to the north of the city, changes everything about the area. It is not a natural feature — it was built in the 1950s for irrigation and flood control — but nature has occupied it with the thoroughness that nature applies to all available water in the Llanos. The shoreline has become significant wetland habitat: herons, cormorants, ducks, and wading birds in numbers that justify the early alarm call. A local fisherman named Rogelio who I hired for a morning on the water told me the reservoir had essentially created a second Llanos ecosystem alongside the natural one — one that the birds in particular had been quick to colonize. He said this without any particular wonder, in the matter-of-fact tone of someone reporting a fact that has been obvious to him for thirty years.

The fishing from the reservoir is remarkable by any standard. Pavón — the peacock bass — reaches sizes here that would seem implausible to anyone who has only caught the species in stocked lakes elsewhere. Rogelio’s record from the previous season was over seven kilos, and he described it with the understated pride of someone who had moved past the need to exaggerate. We caught three fish in the first two hours of the morning, released two and kept one, and ate it for lunch at a small restaurant near the dam that cooked it whole over charcoal and served it with a yuca salad that tasted of lime and coriander.

The town itself rewards a slow morning walk — the central plaza, the Saturday market where farmers from the surrounding ranches come to sell, the old church that has been rebuilt several times but retains a certain colonial gravity. There is a small museum that maintains displays on the regional natural history and includes, inevitably, material on Humboldt’s visit — preserved eels, copies of his field notes, a portrait of del Pozo in the severe formal style of the early nineteenth century. It is the kind of museum that a larger city would dismiss as minor and that here feels essential.

When to go: January through March for the reservoir at its most productive for fishing and birding; the dry-season draw-down concentrates the fish in deeper water and makes the shoreline wetlands more accessible. The town hosts a regional festival in late July that fills the plaza with joropo music and cattle-themed competitions, which is its own kind of spectacle — raw, local, and completely undesigned for visitors.