To the east of Valencia lay valuable gold washings, and to work these the Spaniards fixed a camp at San Francisco in the Aragua Valley about 1560. This is the garden spot of Venezuela, and the warlike Teques Indians, under their terrible chief, Guaicaipuro, massacred the miners and defeated several expeditions from Valencia and Barquisimeto. It was not until 1567 that the Spaniards succeeded in establishing their power in the valley of Caracas, which, a hundred miles east of Valencia, lies close to the shore, although three thousand feet above sea-level and separated from the ocean by high mountains. The defensibility of the site as well as the fertility of the soil pointed it out as the best place for the seat of government. A city was founded which ten years later replaced Coro as the capital of the province, and shortly thereafter a port was opened at La Guaira giving direct communication with Spain. The savage tribes fought more pertinaciously than the civilised natives of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile and Argentina, and a greater number of Europeans and negroes replaced those who were slain. Finally, however, the majority submitted, and were incorporated as peasants into the Spanish system. By the end of the sixteenth century the Spaniards had obtained undisputed possession of that lovely strip of mountainous country which extends from Cape Codera west between two parallel coast ranges to Barquisimeto and thence west-south-west nearly to the head of Lake Maracaibo--a belt some four hundred miles long and fifty or seventy-five wide. They also held the great peninsula east of Maracaibo Gulf, and had established outlying settlements in the llanos south of the mountains, besides the two isolated ports--Cumana on the eastern coast and Maracaibo on the western. Notwithstanding the sack of Caracas in 1595 by the daring British buccaneer, Amyas Preston, the colony prospered. Unlike the Pacific coast, it had easy and direct communication with the Antilles and Europe; the altitude was great enough to ensure a healthful climate, while its fertile valleys could be reached from the sea in a few hours over easy passes, far different from those formidable gorges which are the only ways of reaching the table-lands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The interior, instead of being a heavily forested plain like that of the Amazon, practically inaccessible behind tremendous rain-soaked declivities, was an open prairie into which the mountains sank gently, and whose grassy expanses afforded pasture for innumerable herds. These geographical and topographical features have been determinative of Venezuela's development and history, political as well as industrial.