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Villavicencio ((:biʎaβiˈsensjo)) is a city and municipality in Colombia, capital of Meta department, with 361,058 inhabitants (2005 census). The city is located at 4°08'N, 73°40'W, 75 km (about 45 m) southeast of the Colombian capital city of Bogotá (DC) by the Guatiquía River. It is affectionately called "Villavo". Lying in a rural zone of tropical climate, Villavicencio is on the great Colombian-Venezuelan plain called Los Llanos, which is situated to the east of the Andes mountains. Villavicencio is also called "La Puerta al Llano", or "The Gateway to the Plains", due to its location on the historical path from the Colombian interior to the vast savannas that lie between the Andes range and the Amazon rainforest. Villavicencio's proximity to huge mountains and great plains make the city an example of Colombia's geodiversity. Because it is located in the foothills of the Andes, the morning and evening breezes cool the city that is very hot for most of the day. ==History== The German Conquistador Nikolaus Federmann reached the altiplano of Bogotá in 1536 by approaching it from the plains of Venezuela, a large unsettled area that is formed by the Orinoco basin. However, this vast area remained unexplored and uncolonized for the next 300 years. Colombia was settled along the mountainous folds of the Magdalena and Cauca valleys, and all of its commerce with the outside world was oriented towards the Caribbean Sea, thus, because of its mountainous barriers, the extreme heat, and inhospitable climate, the Llanos remained forgotten and unsettled. The Llaneros, the inhabitants of the plains, are fierce horsemen who first fought for the Spanish royalists and then for the Venezuelan and Colombian rebels during the War of Independence. By crossing the Cordillera Oriental with Bolívar, they surprised the royalist army on the plains of Boyaca on the 6th of August, 1819, and cleared the way for the taking of an abandoned Santa Fe de Bogotá one week later. In the 1840s, some farmers from Caqueza, a town on the eastern folds of Bogotá started the modest settlement of Gramalote, which officially became the parish of Villavicencio in 1855. The parish was named for Antonio Villavicencio, a patriot in the Colombian war of independence. Vaccines, a mule road, and the availability of vast areas of free land, drove new colonizers to continue the settlement of Villavicencio. As the roads improved the access to the Llanos, the farmers could send their produce and cattle to the markets of Bogotá. After the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a popular Liberal politician in 1948, the large landowners saw a pretext to drive farmers out of their lands. The Llaneros resisted by driving the army out of population centers. The guerrillas never took Villavicencio, but they brought the fighting to the military base of Apiay. As the fighting between the government and the Llanero guerrillas was out of control, a military coup in June 1953, took Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power who immediately negotiated a cease fire and amnesty for the insurgents. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Villavicencio」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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