Buildings age, just like human beings. They become uninhabited, abandoned, forgotten... In older cities, many of these buildings have historical and heritage value, and the right thing to do would be for government agencies to try to restore them and put them to public use. However, this is not always the case. Suddenly, due to circumstantial interests, they resort to the easiest option, which I call “urban makeup.” They simply patch up and paint the façade so that it doesn’t look bad.
This is what happened to the building shown in the photos. It is a two-story house that used to be an old hotel (or inn) and restaurant, located on a corner in the city center. It is said that the naturalist explorers Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland lived there for a time in the early 19th century (we do not know what it was used for at that time).
They painted the facade white and created a small mural of the Virgin of the Valley. Curiously, in the main photo, the image of the Virgin is overlapped by that of a modern girl from Cumaná.
