Mucuchíes

The Trans-Andina Highway brings you to Mucuchíes, founded in 1596 on the site of a precolonial village. (You'll spot the prefix mucu—meaning "place of"in the indigenous language—at the beginning of the names of many Andean villages. This one means "Place of Cold.") The starkly beautiful landscape—scrub-filled fields and barren hillsides—includes a handful of pristine lakes and plenty of rocky, cold-water streams. This is truly some of the most fascinating landscape in all of Venezuela—get your cameras ready.