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Cachuela Esperanza
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Cachuela Esperanza is a village in the Bolivian Departamento Pando.
Location
Cachuela Esperanza ("rapids of hope") is situated on the right bank at the rapids of Beni River, 30 km before its confluence with Mamore River which both form the Madeira River there. The village is only accessible on dirt roads and is located at an elevation of 134 m.
History
The place at the Beni rapids was discovered in 1846 by the Bolivian scientist Jose Agustin. Attracted by the rubber boom, Nicolas Suarez Callau with his six brothers crossed the Andes and at Cachuela Esperanza set up his company's headquarter of a multinational rubber empire, with branches at Acre, Manaus, Belem, and London.
He had a theater and tennis courts built, a luxury hotel overlooking the rapids, and a modern hospital. Cachuela Esperanza had the first X-ray unit of Bolivia, and millionaires from Rio de Janeiro und Sao Paulo were flown in by seaplanes. In the 1920s, when natural rubber was substituted by synthetic rubber gradually, the importance of Cachuela Esperanza declined, and with the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 the artificial djungle town sank into insignificance once and for all.
Population
Today, Cachuela Esperanza has a more 200 inhabitants. In the past, the most significant personality of the town was Nicolas Suarez Callau, the "rubber king", along with the tin barons Patino, Hochschild and Aramayo one of the most influential tycoons of Bolivia. Moreover, in 1925 Cachulea Esperanza was the birthplace of Eugen Gomringer, son of a Swiss and a Bolivian girl, who is seen as the father of "Concrete Poetry".
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Cachuela Esperanza
