Maracaibo Lake Day?

Every year they make us celebrate in Venezuela, the discovery of Lake Maracaibo. How boring the same thing every year, celebrating the discovery of a populated site everywhere.

It is time to say that it was on August 24, 1499 when the Spanish hordes arrived. The foreigners heard a word, perhaps about a God of the waters Coquibacoa. This is how the de Hojeda (Alonso de Ojeda) puts it in his writings.

Lake Maracaibo, our body of water is the center of a hydrographic basin of the same name. The lake has seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand (728,000) meters of coastline. In its structure there are three parts, it has a body to the south, a strait in front of Maracaibo and an estuary to the north, where it merges into our Caribbean Sea, with thirteen million two hundred and eighty thousand (13,280,000) square meters of surface..

Our lake has under its lacustrine soil, oil and groundwater.

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders, around the lake, on its shores and throughout the territory of the Maracaibo Lake Basin lived a conglomerate of communities that succumbed to the wickedness of the Spanish. The arrival of the Spaniards to Zulia is remembered every August 24. Therefore the lake was not discovered, it was sighted, observed, unfortunately found, by people who had never seen it, but not discovered.

The de Hojeda took his trophies of invasion: the cotton fabrics made by its inhabitants, he took people to exhibit them perhaps, especially a girl from here and he took her as a woman. It is not known her real name, she changed it and called her Isabel (and that in honor of the Queen of Spain). She, when her "husband" died, cried where he was buried, there at the door of the cathedral of the city of Santo Domingo, the current capital of the Dominican Republic. One day, she was found dead on top of the tomb. In our city of Maracaibo, two sculptures were made, one in the Plaza Alonso de Ojeda in Valles Fríos and another in front of the Casa de la Cultura, diagonal to the Central Hospital, in both she is lying on the tomb of Alonso de Ojeda.

The lake is not only ecology, it is part of the imagery, of the catholic devotion, because in the lake the little board of the Virgin of Chiquinquira, better known as the Virgin Chinita, was placed. But the beach where she was found no longer exists due to anthropic occupation. If the ship that came from the current Dominican Republic and is presumed to have been shipwrecked in the Caribbean Sea, how did it enter the lake, at high tide the marine current enters the lake. The current of the lake following the coriolis effect, comes from El Moján and passes through the entire West Coast, South of the Lake, East Coast of the Lake to continue in the form of a whirlpool to the center of the Lake.

In its origin, it is said that the lake was formed when the Andes Mountain Range and its Perijá branch rose in the Tertiary. Then the central zone sank. We have proposed a theory: that when these mountain areas rose, the river basins flowed. Two basins were formed, an eastern basin of the Agua Viva rivers and a western basin of the Escalante and Catatumbo rivers. When advancing to the north, to look for the sea they were obtained between La Cañada to the west and Santa Rita to the east, falling to the Estuary.

We believe or propose that a meteorite fell in front of La Ceiba, the deepest eccentric bathymetry zone of the body of Lake Maracaibo, which is why there is a port in that area, sunk the land and depressed until it joined the two river basins (western and eastern), leaving the current appearance.

The lake has oil, in the years before the formation of the lake, those meadows between rivers was the seat of an exuberant biological diversity, in addition to the migration of animals in the ice ages, was massive towards tropical regions like ours. They were surprised by death and the layers of accumulated material buried them, with the due contribution of their bodies to the formation of oil.

The lake has had oil in it for many, many years and sublacustrine menes have existed and therefore many species have been dealing with those spills ever since. In other words, ecological resilience has been built up for a long time. The attack (spills) has increased at the expense of oil exploitation.

Lake Maracaibo pours its waters from the estuary or northern zone into our Caribbean Sea, the inner sea of the Atlantic Ocean. That is what does not allow it to die because its waters go to the Gulf of Venezuela, because it pours its waters and pollution into the Gulf of Venezuela. We should know what is the impact of the pollution that our lake discharges into this part of our Caribbean Sea.

Finally, the jurisdiction of the lake is governed by the government at the national level.

The governorates of the states of Zulia, Trujillo and Mérida do not have jurisdiction in the body of water; they are dry coast states. The same for the municipalities, they are dry coast municipalities. This is something that impacts the lake, their national aldermen are in Caracas and cannot perform Environmental Control.