same day from the coast to the valleys of Aragua. In order to examine
this road, we set out on the 26th of February in the evening for the
farm of Barbula.

On the morning of the 27th we visited the hot springs of La Trinchera,
three leagues from Valencia. The ravine is very large, and the descent
almost continual from the banks of the lake to the sea-coast. La
Trinchera takes its name from some fortifications of earth, thrown up
in 1677 by the French buccaneers, who sacked the town of Valencia. The
hot springs (and this is a remarkable geological fact,) do not issue
on the south side of the mountains, like those of Mariara, Onoto, and
the Brigantine; but they issue from the chain itself almost at its
northern declivity. They are much more abundant than any we had till
then seen, forming a rivulet which, in times of the greatest drought,
is two feet deep and eighteen wide. The temperature of the water,
measured with great care, was 90.3 degrees of the centigrade
thermometer. Next to the springs of Urijino, in Japan, which are
asserted to be pure water at 100 degrees of temperature, the waters of
the Trinchera of Porto Cabello appear to be the hottest in the world.
We breakfasted near the spring; eggs plunged into the water were
boiled in less than four minutes. These waters, strongly charged with
sulphuretted hydrogen, gush out from the back of a hill rising one
hundred and fifty feet above the bottom of the ravine, and tending
from south-south-east to north-north-west. The rock from which the
springs gush, is a real coarse-grained granite, resembling that of the
Rincon del Diablo, in the mountains of Mariara. Wherever the waters
evaporate in the air, they form sediments and incrustations of
carbonate of lime; possibly they traverse strata of primitive
limestone, so common in the mica-slate and gneiss of the coasts of
Caracas. We were surprised at the luxuriant vegetation that surrounds