The 19 of April of 1810 the originating Revolution on April 19, 1810, when a popular movement rejects in Caracas to the newly appointed governor of the province, Vicente Emparan, who had been awarded to office by King José I of Spain. The Cabildo of Caracas and part of the bourgeoisie and the Creole aristocracy do not know the new Captain General, so from the balcony of the town located in the main square, Emparan himself asks the people gathered there if they agree with him continuing. his mandate, the priest Madariaga signaled to the population present to answer in the negative, and that was what happened. So Emparan replied that he did not want the command then, that same day the act for the establishment of a new government was drawn up. The 5 of July of 1811 we proceed in the capital to sign the Act of the Declaration of Independence of Venezuela, generating the beginning of the War of Independence of Venezuela.
In 1812 the city was almost completely destroyed by a new Venezuelan Earthquake of 1812, the third in less than two centuries, it is said that more than 10 thousand people died and as a result of this, which occurred in the middle of the War of Independence, the Religious authorities, pro-royalists in their vast majority, took advantage of the phenomenon to suggest the people, arguing that the earthquake was a divine punishment against the patriots who were trying to emancipate Venezuela, to which Bolívar understanding the danger of such harmful propaganda in favor of the king Spaniard, outraged, responded with the famous exclamation: “If Nature opposes it, we will fight against it, and we will make it obey us!”
In 1821 Caracas lost the capital of the Republic, when Gran Colombia was created, which united the current republics of Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela. However, the Colombian Republic dissolves and the Constitution of Cúcuta is repealed, so that in 1830 the city of Caracas was once again the federal capital of Venezuela. The decades that followed these independence events would originate a series of civil wars and revolutions carried out by numerous caudillos eager for power.
According to allcitycodes, President Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who during his governments promoted a model of modernization and construction of new public works in the city.
Towards the last third of the 19th century, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, an enlightened president influenced by the general Frenchification of the time, promoted a series of urban changes and new constructions, demolishing the old Hispanic-style convents and constructing new inspired buildings in their place. on the European model.
President Guzmán Blanco brought several railway projects, squares, museums, theaters and boulevards from France and wanted to make Caracas his “little Paris “, so much of the national income was used to transform the architecture and urban planning of the city. In the city, guided by Parisian architectural forms, boulevards, public buildings, arches and commemorative statues were built, some even in honor of Guzmán Blanco himself. The city was provided with sewers and sewers, although ill-advised, it ordered that the Guaire River be used as the main drainage route for the city’s sewage. Also, in his government electrical services and a telephone network were established.
The Guzmancist era had its most characteristic feature in the construction of architectural works, giving the city the air of current neoclassical eclecticism in its oldest surviving buildings. Among the most prominent are the Capitol, the National Pantheon, the Palace of the Academies, the Municipal Theater, the Federation Arch, El Calvario, the Santa Capilla, the Basilica of Santa Teresa, the Masonic Temple and on the occasion of the centenary of the Birth of the Liberator, the equestrian statue in Plaza Bolívar.
The figure of Antonio Guzmán Blanco remains very contradictory to this day, many consider that the legacy of the Illustrious American, contributed more than any other predecessor regime in the urban revolution and culturalization of Caracas, in the introduction of the infrastructure changes that the city demanded and in the civil character of his government, which concluded in the collective aspiration to preserve and project the refinement of the city.
At the end of the 19th century, specifically in 1895, the creation of a new electricity company was undertaken, known today as Electricidad de Caracas, which at that time supplied the city with a precarious public lighting system that illuminated its main streets and ports. The capital was not the first to have an electric power service, since previously other cities in the interior already had this service. In 1897, the second hydroelectric plant in America, called El Encantado, was inaugurated near Caracas, which lights the city with a power of 420 kW.
