Juan de Carvajal

The scribe who became a founder

Juan de Carvajal was born in Castile in the early sixteenth century and, like so many poor hidalgos, sought his fortune in the Indies. He arrived in the Province of Venezuela —then granted by Charles V to the German bankers Welsers of Augsburg in payment for the loans that had financed his imperial coronation— and served as royal scribe in Coro, the provincial capital.

By 1544, conditions in Coro had become unbearable: a hostile climate, poor soils, and a lack of resources. Philipp von Hutten, the last German governor, had been absent for years searching for El Dorado in the upper Amazon. Carvajal seized on the power vacuum and, considering that the German authorities had abandoned the province, organized on his own account an expedition of about 120 people —Andalusians, Portuguese, Florentines, Swiss, Canary Islanders, Germans, and the Genoese Galeotto Cey— to settle inland.

The founding of El Tocuyo

After nearly four months of travel, Carvajal and his party reached a fertile valley watered by a powerful river, in the territory of the cacique Xagua. There, on December 7, 1545, he founded the city he named "Nuestra Señora de la Pura y Limpia Concepción de El Tocuyo" (Our Lady of the Pure and Immaculate Conception of El Tocuyo). The chosen location —rich farmland, abundant water, manageable climate— proved providential: El Tocuyo would become the logistical base from which much of central and western Venezuela was settled.

Traveling with Carvajal was Catalina de Miranda, a Sevillian who had arrived in Coro on January 1, 1545, and who appears in the chronicles as his consort and as one of the first settlers of El Tocuyo.

Conflict with the Welsers

In early 1546, Philipp von Hutten returned from his long expedition in the upper Amazon, accompanied by Bartholomeus Welser VI "the Younger" —son of the Welser banker— and other survivors. Passing through El Tocuyo and learning that Carvajal had proclaimed himself lieutenant governor, Hutten demanded an explanation. The argument escalated: Welser struck Carvajal with the shaft of a lance and threw him into the mud.

"Beyond the bounds of reason" —as the chroniclers put it— Carvajal ordered the beheading, in May 1546, of Philipp von Hutten, Bartholomeus Welser VI, Diego Romero, and Gregorio de Plasencia. The execution of the Germans marked the end of the Welser concession over Venezuela: Charles V revoked the contract and the province returned to Spanish administration.

Trial and hanging

The Crown sent the licentiate Juan Pérez de Tolosa as judge to investigate what had happened. After a summary trial, Pérez de Tolosa handed down sentence on September 16, 1546: Carvajal was to be dragged by a horse's tail to the gallows and hanged in the main square.

On September 17, 1546, Juan de Carvajal was hanged from the very same ceiba tree —tradition holds— where the Germans had been executed months earlier. He died in the city he had founded, barely nine months after its founding.

Legacy

Carvajal's figure is ambiguous: for some, a bold founder who opened western Venezuela to Spanish settlement; for others, a murderer whose arbitrary execution cost the empire its concession. What is certain is that without his founding act there would be no Mother City (Ciudad Madre), and from its original layout departed the expeditions that founded Barquisimeto, Trujillo, Carora, Borburata, Valencia, and many other cities of the country.

Today El Tocuyo remembers him as founder, without hiding the bloody episode of his brief and tragic government.