The founders of La Asuncio'n built the town in the high hills a dozen miles from the sea as protection from pirate raids. La Asuncio'n is the island's official capital, although its population - about 12,000 - is only a fraction of Porlamar's, the principal coastal city. These venerable structures gaze down upon a traditional Spanish plaza, the center of town, shaded from the hot sun by towering old trees. The remarkably handsome hill town of La Asuncio'n, settled by Spain in 1561, is dominated by a solid Old World fortress and a beautiful parish church that dates back to the 16th century. Here are the whitewashed walls, red-tiled roofs, flowering gardens and fragrant citrus groves of the romantic Iberian countryside. Explore the island's well-maintained roads leading from its lovely beaches into the pleasantly verdant hills of the interior, where rainfall is a bit more abundant, and you come upon picturesque colonial-era villages that seem transported from the Mediterranean. You can be sure very little rain intrudes on a sunbathing visitor.Ī big factor, of course, is Margarita's Spanish heritage. Cactus plants - not the banana trees and lush foliage of a typically tropical Caribbean island - thrive on the otherwise empty flatlands of the southern coastal area, which is the part of the island visitors first see. Partly, I think, because much of Margarita, which is Venezuelan, has the dry, desert look so common to the Mediterranean. So why did I keep thinking - on a short visit earlier this year - that I had somehow landed thousands of miles away on a Mediterranean shore?

The large, sunbaked island of Margarita, just 18 miles off the coast of Venezuela, is definitely located in the Caribbean.

Margarita city venezuela