Founding and the name
Porlamar dates its founding to 26 March 1536, when Friar Francisco de Villacorta, the parish priest of Nueva Cádiz on the neighbouring island of Cubagua, established a settlement on Margarita’s south coast. The Guaiquerí people lived along this coast before the Spanish arrived.
The town went through several names in its first decades. Accounts list San Pedro Mártir and Villa del Espíritu Santo before it settled as Pueblo de la Mar, the “town of the sea”. Porlamar is a contraction of that name. Sources disagree on the exact sequence and on whether the settlement moved in the 1560s, so treat the early names as tradition rather than settled record.
Much of what is written about the founding goes back to Jesús Manuel Subero, Porlamar’s official city chronicler, whose book Porlamar. Glosa de una Ciudad Marina remains the standard local history. The city still celebrates its anniversary every 26 March.
The island of pearls
Columbus sighted Margarita in 1498, and the pearl beds off its coast made the island one of the first sources of wealth for Spain in the Americas. Margarita is still called the Isle of Pearls, and Porlamar grew up as the centre of the island’s pearl fishing.
Even so, Porlamar was never the seat of government. La Asunción, inland, was and still is the capital of Margarita and of Nueva Esparta state. Porlamar’s role was the port and the market, a division of labour that holds today.
Independence and the burning of 1817
Margarita was early to break with Spain. On 4 May 1810, a gathering in La Asunción declared the island’s support for the junta formed in Caracas on 19 April and rejected Spanish authority. Avenida 4 de Mayo, one of Porlamar’s main avenues, shares the date.
The island paid for it. Bolívar used Margarita as a base in 1816, and in 1817 royalist forces under General Pablo Morillo attacked. Accounts of the campaign record Porlamar being razed, its church included, and the fort on the point where the lighthouse now stands was burned. Morillo was eventually driven off the island.
Church, lighthouse and a slow-growing town
Rebuilding took most of the nineteenth century. Work on the church of San Nicolás de Bari, facing Plaza Bolívar on Bulevar Guevara, began in 1853 and the church was blessed in December 1864; its tower was rebuilt from 1901 and the clock tower finished in 1914. San Nicolás is the city’s patron saint, and his feast on 6 December is still Porlamar’s main religious celebration.
The lighthouse at La Puntilla was begun in February 1895 on the site of the burned fort and first lit on 1 January 1896. It is a protected heritage monument but has been left to deteriorate.
Porlamar stayed a modest place for a long time: censuses counted roughly 5,700 people in 1891 and 6,400 in 1941.
The free port and the boom
The modern city was made by the free port. A 1966 law allowed a free-trade regime for Nueva Esparta, and under President Carlos Andrés Pérez it became reality in the mid-1970s: the free port was decreed in 1974 and in effect by 1975. (Sources give slightly different dates for the decrees.) Imported goods sold on the island were exempt from most duties, and Venezuelans flew and ferried in to shop.
Construction, tourism and commerce boomed. Avenida 4 de Mayo and Avenida Santiago Mariño filled with international duty-free stores, Bulevar Gómez and Bulevar Guevara with older shops, and the Conejeros municipal market opened in the early 1980s. Porlamar’s population went from about 32,000 in 1971 to around 85,000 by 2005, and the city grew until it all but merged with Pampatar to the east.
The law in force today is the Ley del Puerto Libre del Estado Nueva Esparta of August 2000.
Decline
As Venezuela’s economy collapsed in the 2010s, so did the shopping trips that had sustained Porlamar. Import advantages eroded, and by April 2022 about 95% of the roughly 960 dry-goods stalls at Conejeros market were shut. Large hotels closed; the Lagunamar had been shut since 2017, and by late 2024 several big hotels stood in ruins while the government marketed the island to Russian tourists.
Daily life got harder. Subsidised petrol was phased out at half the island’s stations in 2022, and after a gas-plant explosion in Monagas in November 2024 parts of Porlamar went without power for 10 to 20 hours a day.
2026: reopening
The political change of January 2026 reopened Venezuela to the United States. The State Department lowered its travel advisory to Level 3 in March, direct flights from Miami to Caracas resumed in April, and the ferry from Puerto La Cruz to Margarita restarted in June after three years. Tourism is recovering: hotels on Margarita and Coche were about 90% full over Easter 2026, and Copa plans the first new international route to Porlamar, from Panama, in November.
Business owners are pushing for a reformed free-port law to bring back the commerce that built the city. What the city is like right now, from power and water to flights and prices, is on our Porlamar today page.