History of El Hatillo

Company, which was in charge of maintaining exclusive trade between Spain and Venezuela. Don Baltasar founded El Hatillo Town, becoming one of the most significant contributors to its early development. Don Baltasar focused on making El Hatillo a strong, united and independent community, aiming to establish the area as a distinct parish from Baruta, on which El Hatillo depended. He accomplished this on June 12, 1784, when the governor and the bishop agreed to declare El Hatillo autonomous and under the direction of Don Baltasar, in front of 180 Canary-descendant families; this date is accepted as the foundation date of El Hatillo Town.

That same year, Don Baltasar and his brother-in-law donated their properties to the town, and an engineer assisted in the urban planning, which included grid streets and a parish church. The church was built to honor Santa Rosalía de Palermo, who Baltasar believed had saved him from a plague that killed his father in prison. In 1803, at the age of 79, Don Baltasar was unexpectedly killed in a horse accident.

In 1809, landlord and Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Escalona achieved the separation of El Hatillo from Petare, another suburb of Caracas, making it a different Tenientazgo de Justicia—a type of administrative division at the time. On April 19, 1810, Escalona enjoined the town to the movement of independence under Simón Bolívar, becoming another important person in the history of the municipality.

Ana Francisca Pérez García, Don Baltasar's wife, was a noteworthy woman in El Hatillo, attending to community children, elders and ill citizens. She donated a considerable amount of money for the construction of a hospital in Petare after the 1812 earthquake; this hospital is currently known as the Pérez de León de Petare Hospital.

One of the most ambitious urbanization projects in El Hatillo since