Colonia Tovar

In 1843, settlers from Germany's Kaiserstuhl founded a colony in the cloud forest above the Aragua valleys - and then stayed sealed by bad roads for a century, preserving dialect, recipes and fachwerk carpentry until the outside world arrived to find a Schwarzwald village blooming at 1,800 metres in the tropics. Today Colonia Tovar is Venezuela's favourite mountain outing: timber-gabled hotels and beer gardens, strawberries-and-cream stalls, sausage platters and strudel, a Germanic church on the plaza, and cool mist threading the peach orchards. Kitsch history share the streets amiably; the temperature drop alone justifies the drive.

History

Agostino Codazzi, Ramón Díaz and Martín Tovar y Ponte formed a company to bring settlers from the Kaiserstuhl in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and the site was laid out as Palmar del Tuy on October 14, 1841. The emigrants sailed from Le Havre on January 19, 1843, landed at La Guaira on 4 March, and reached the colony on April 8, 1843, 112 days after leaving Baden, a group of 390 people who first lived by growing coffee (Wikipedia, Colonia Tovar).

What's there

• The fachwerk streets - Black Forest carpentry in cloud-forest green.
• The plaza church - the colony's Germanic heart.
• Strawberries and strudel - the food traditions that survived intact.
• The orchard lanes - peaches and flowers on the cool slopes.

When to go

Year round - the altitude keeps it spring-cool; weekends and holidays bring the festive crowds and full menus, weekdays the quiet version. Mist is part of the costume.

Good to know

It is unapologetically touristic - trinket shops and costume kitsch included - yet the history underneath is real and the food honours it. Weekend traffic on the mountain road tests patience. Prices run resort-scale by national standards.

Nearby

Caracas, the Aragua valleys and the coast road descents.