menegrande

Riches from Venezuela’s oil boom emerged in Mene Grande. Today, it is a town ravaged by power outages and poverty, and also decimated by emigration. Its residents hope to improve with the new agreement between Venezuela and the US.
In Mene Grande, the birthplace of Venezuela’s oil industry, crude oil seeps from the ground even in the yards of houses. Puffs of bubbling gases mix with the hydrocarbons that permeate the air with an odor that can cause dizziness.
More than a century after it set off an oil boom, the small town of about 27,000 people is once again in investors’ sights, raising “many expectations.”

📊 A town that floats over oil and lives in the dark
There is a corner in Zulia where oil is not sought: you trip over it. In Mene Grande, a hamlet of about 27,000 inhabitants in the Lake Maracaibo basin, crude seeps in yards, forming black rills between the weeds and lifting small gas puffs that make anyone passing nearby dizzy. It was there that the Venezuelan oil industry began more than a century ago. Today it is also the harshest portrait of what remains: wealth underfoot, poverty in the refrigerator, and blackouts that can stretch up to 17 hours.