In the early years of the seventeenth century the long-neglected Cumaná district on the eastern coast began to be developed. The city of Barcelona was founded in 1617 near a magnificent body of grazing land and in the best tobacco country in Venezuela, where the Indians had grown the plant for untold generations. Barcelona soon became an important centre of population, and the starting-point for missionaries to the interior tribes. The gold placers which had attracted the first adventurers to the mountains west of Caracas became exhausted within a few decades. Nevertheless, the fertile lands, distributed among the Spaniards in encomiendas, continued to be cultivated by Indian and negro labour, but, although maize, bananas, potatoes, and in the higher valleys even wheat, as well as the vine and olive, with the cattle introduced by Europeans, furnished an abundant supply of food, to say nothing of tobacco and sugar, Spain's blind colonial policy virtually prevented export of agricultural products. The Spanish authorities wanted nothing from their American dominions but gold and silver, and when Venezuela's placers were exhausted the colony was neglected. It was in spite of the prohibition of the Spanish government that cacao trees were introduced, and the exportation which soon grew up--the first of any importance from Venezuela--was mostly clandestine. Practically all the goods legally imported had to be procured from the Cadiz monopoly, and were sent to the Isthmus and there transhipped into coasting vessels, paying enormous freight charges, profits, and duties. Tobacco and salt were monopolised by government concessionaires, and not a chicken could be sold in the markets without paying an exorbitant tax.
Education was completely neglected. It was not until 1696 that a priests' school was established in Caracas, and when the city of Merida asked a similar boon, it was denied because "His Catholic Majesty did not deem it wise that education should become general in America." So the Creoles grew up nearly as ignorant as the Indians around them, although retaining all the fierce pride of their Spanish descent, acknowledging no man as superior, and retaining very dim sentiments of loyalty to the mother country. Nevertheless, the ancient municipal forms, traditional among peoples of Spanish descent, survived, furnishing the framework of civil government, while the priesthood constituted a moral and intellectual tie binding the Creoles to their Castilian ancestors.