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Ciudad Guayana
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Ciudad Guayana (Guayana City) is a city in Bolivar State, Venezuela. It lies south of the Orinoco, where the river is joined by the Caroni River. The city, officially founded in 1961, is actually composed of the old town of San Felix at the east and the new town of Puerto Ordaz at the west, which lie either banks of the Caroni and are connected by three bridges. The city stretches 40 kilometers along the south bank of the Orinoco. With approximately one million people, it is a large city by Venezuelan standards. It is also the country's fastest-growing city, due to its important iron industry.
It is one of Venezuela's five most important ports, since most goods produced in Bolivar are shipped through it into the Atlantic Ocean, via the Orinoco river. Ciudad Guayana is also the location of the Second Orinoco crossing.
History
Since its foundation it has grown from two fledgling towns into the Guayana region's most important industrial center, and a hub of growth in an otherwise typically underpopulated region of Venezuela.
Much critique has been made about its design, which was created by a number of planners from MIT and Harvard in the early 1960s. Lisa Peattie's "A View From the Barrio" is a good discussion of the adverse social effects that occur when a modernist city is placed without regard for context in the middle of nowhere.
See also
Railway stations in Venezuela
External links
"Guayana City, (Puerto Ordaz & San Felix)" VenezuelaTuya, photographs of the city
"La Guayana de Antano", History in Pictures
BBC article in a Puerto Ordaz aluminium plant
FallingRain Map - elevatsion = 10m (Red dots are railways)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Ciudad Guayana
