Caripe

Caripe is a town in Caripe Municipality in the mountainous north of the state of Monagas in eastern Venezuela. The official name of the town is Caripe del Guácharo 'Caripe of the Oilbird'. The name makes reference to a colony of nocturnal birds which lives in a nearby cave, the Cueva del Guácharo, where Alexander von Humboldt studied them in 1799 during his Latin American Expedition.

At the time of Humboldt's visit Caripe was the home of a Capuchin mission. The name of the town is doubtless originally from the Carib language. It was said that there was a chief named Caripe, whose son, named Caripito ('little Caripe') went down the Caripe river towards its confluence with the Río San Juan (which empties into the Golfo de Paria near the Orinoco River delta) and founded the town of Caripito in the lowlands. It is not clear how much history lies behind the legend.

The climate of the area is exceptionally pleasant, a result of its altitude (much of it 1000 m. [3000 ft.] and higher), latitude (about 10° N), and proximity to the Caribbean Sea. The mountains of the Cordillera de Caripe (Caripe Range) are relatively low, compared to the Andes in the west of Venezuela, with Cerro Turumiquire (sometimes spelt and presumably then pronounced as Turimiquire) the highest at 2595 m., followed by Cerro Negro at 2430 m. They are rounded mountains, covered with lush vegetation, like the Appalachian mountains in the United States; the limestone scenery reminded Alexander von Humboldt of Derbyshire in England which has similar limestone geology.