llanos [lah-noh; Sp. yah-naw]

llanos

[lah-noh; Sp. yah-naw]

llanos, Spanish American term for prairies, specifically those of the Orinoco River basin of N South America, in Venezuela and E Colombia. The llanos of the Orinoco are a vast, hot region of rolling savanna broken by low-lying mesas, scrub forest, and scattered palms. Elevation above sea level never reaches more than a few hundred feet. During the dry season (November to April) the land is sear, the grass brown, brittle, and inedible; during the rainy season much of the area is inundated. The region is subject to insect plagues. The sparsely populated llanos support a pastoral economy; cattle raising is dominant. With flood control and water storage projects in the region, sections of the llanos have been turned into fertile agricultural land. Oil has been found there. Ciudad Bolívar and San Fernando de Apure are the chief cities of the region. The llanero, an expert horseman comparable to the gaucho of the Argentine pampas, is of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and black African stock. The llanero has played an important role in Venezuelan history as an ardent henchman of successive revolutionary caudillos, notably José Antonio Páez.

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Llanos

Los Llanos redirect here, for the Chilean region see: Los Llanos, Chile

Los Llanos (meaning the flat plains) is a vast tropical grassland plain situated at the east of the Andes in northwestern South America (Colombia and Venezuela). Its main river is the Orinoco.

Despite poor climate, during the colonial era, llaneros (similar to the gauchos of the pampas) herded millions of heads of cattle here.

The area slopes gradually away from the highland areas that surround it; elevations in the llanos never exceed 200 meters.

Originally, llano is the Spanish word for plain. It became the Spanish-American term for prairie.