Ávila / Waraira Repano

Ávila — known since 2011 by its indigenous name, Waraira Repano — is the mountain range separating Caracas from the Caribbean coast, protected since 1958 as one of Venezuela's oldest national parks. Its slopes rise from around 120 meters to Pico Naiguatá at 2,765 meters, and the mountain is often called "the lungs of the city" for the way it buffers Caracas from the coast and holds back urban sprawl along its southern face.

Name and history

The mountain's older name, Ávila, dates to the Spanish colonial era, after a governor who kept orchards on its slopes around 1600; the name appears in Caracas municipal records as early as 1778. In 2011, the park was officially renamed Waraira Repano to honor the indigenous Caribe peoples who inhabited the Caracas valley before colonization — sources differ on the exact translation, most commonly rendered as "great mountain range," though some connect it instead to "land of tapirs."

The cable car and Hotel Humboldt

A cable car (teleférico) has linked Caracas to the mountain's upper slopes since the mid-1950s, built under President Marcos Pérez Jiménez alongside the striking cylindrical Hotel Humboldt at the top station — a Bauhaus-influenced 14-story tower designed by architect Tomás José Sanabria, built in under 200 days in 1956. Both have been through long cycles of closure, disrepair and restoration: the original cable car network shut down in the late 1970s and was rebuilt in stages over the following decades, and Hotel Humboldt sat largely unused for years before a restoration project reopened it as a five-star hotel.

Hiking

The most popular access point for hikers is Sabas Nieves, reached from the Altamira area of Caracas, from which trails continue toward more demanding routes up Pico Oriental and Pico Occidental. The park's cloud forest holds a wide range of birdlife, alongside mammals, orchids and, near the summit, subpáramo vegetation found nowhere else this close to a major capital.

Current status

On June 24, 2026, two earthquakes in rapid succession (magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, seconds apart) struck Venezuela, and access to Waraira Repano National Park has been restricted since then due to slope instability. As of mid-July 2026, only the Sabas Nieves trail was open — and only as far as the ranger checkpoint — while routes such as Camino de los Españoles and the Cotiza–Galipán road remained closed. Before planning a hike or cable car visit, confirm current access directly: conditions have kept changing week by week, and neither a full reopening timeline nor the current physical state of the cable car and Hotel Humboldt could be confirmed at the time of writing.