Conflict with the Spanish
Following the death of Guaicaipuro, Tamanaco had risen as the new leader of the Mariches and Quiriquires. By 1573 Tamanaco and his group of natives had become such a problem that reinforcements came from Spain and other Spanish islands in the Caribbean with the sole purpose of taking care of this matter.
Soon after captain Pedro Alonso Galeas and lieutenant Francisco Calderón joined their forces, they started on an expedition with the intention of engaging Tamanaco and his men; they were helped by Aricabacuto, another native Chief. Upon learning of this expedition, Tamanaco prepared a fighting force made up of 300 warriors recruited among his tribes and with the help of men from the Teques and Arbaco tribes. It wasn't long before the two groups engaged each other in combat. However neither side came out victorious in their first fight.
Soon after Tamanaco decided to attack Caracas and pursue the Spanish soldiers who retreated to the banks of the river Guaire. The Spanish lost and their commanding officer captain Hernando de la Cerda died in the fighting. However, as the battle seemed to be ending with Tamanaco's victory, a Spanish cavalry detachment came and surrounded the natives.
Caracas, officially Santiago de León de Caracas (CCS), is the capital and largest city of Venezuela, and the center of the Metropolitan Region of Caracas. Caracas is located along the Guaire River in the northern part of the country, within the Caracas Valley of the Venezuelan coastal mountain range. The valley is close to the Caribbean Sea, separated from the coast by a steep 2,200-meter-high (7,200 ft) mountain range, Cerro El Ávila; to the south there are more hills and mountains. The Metropolitan Region of Caracas has an estimated population of almost 5 million inhabitants.
Conquistadors or conquistadores is the term used to refer to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers and explorers who carried out the conquests and explorations of the Age of Discovery. Conquistadors sailed beyond the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas, Oceania, Africa and Asia, establishing new colonies and trade routes. They brought much of the "New World" under the dominion of Spain and Portugal.
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José Cristóbal Hurtado de Mendoza y Montilla, commonly known as Cristóbal Mendoza, was a Venezuelan lawyer, politician, writer, and academic. Cristobal is best known for serving as the first official President of Venezuela from 1811 to 1812. After earning a master's degree in philosophy in Caracas and his doctor utriusque juris in the Dominican Republic, early in his professional career he served in various law firms in Trujillo, Mérida, and Caracas. He moved to Barinas in 1796 to practice law, and in 1807 was elected Mayor of Barinas. In 1810, Mendoza joined the insurgent movement started by wealthy Caracan citizens against the Spanish crown, and in 1811 was elected to represent the province of Barinas in the newly founded Constituent Congress of Venezuela. Days later he was appointed the first president of the First Republic of Venezuela, a role he shared as part of a triumvirate. Until his term ended in March 1812, Mendoza began the war for independence against the parts of Venezuela that still supported the Spanish monarchy, authored the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence, and also took part in constructing the first Constitution of the Republic of Venezuela.
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The Preston–Somers expedition, or the Capture of Caracas, was a series of military actions that took place from late May until the end of July 1595 during the Anglo-Spanish War. The English expedition headed by George Somers and Amyas Preston sailed to the Spanish Main initially intending to support Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition which set out at the same time.
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Apacuana —also transliterated as Apacuane, Apakuama or Apakuana—was a 16th-century woman of the Quiriquires, a branch of the Carib people that inhabited the Valles del Tuy region, in present-day Venezuela, notable for her leading role in a failed indigenous uprising against Spanish colonization in 1577. Her story was presented nearly a century and a half later by writer José de Oviedo y Baños in his 1723 book The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela, a foundational work on the country's history. Introduced by the author as an "elderly sorceress and herbalist", Apacuana is considered to have been a piache, that is, a curandera, a term used in Hispanic America to call a healer or shaman. She was the mother of Guásema, who served as cacique—a term used to designate indigenous tribal chiefs in Hispanic America—while several modern writers consider her to have been a cacica as well.
