La Alquitrana, the beginning of the oil industry in Venezuela, by Manuel Chinchilla Da Silva.

Manuel Antonio Pulido, owner of the coffee farm "La Alquitrana", located in the state Táchira, is the one who discovers that, after a telluric movement, the cracks produced in the soil expelled crude oil in large quantities on April 12, 1875.

After this fact the first Venezuelan oil company is built, in charge of exploiting the material in an industrial way, called "Compañía Nacional Minera Petróla de Táchira" or better known as "Petrólia del Táchira", a partnership between Pulido and five other ranchers and merchants of This region.

The lack of knowledge on oil matters forced one of the partners, Pedro Rafael Rincones, to carry out studies in the United States and to import the machinery necessary to carry out the exploitation of crude oil in an appropriate manner.

By 1878, Manuel Antonio Pulido finally obtains the rights to perform mining and exploitation work on his land of "La Alquitrana". Mainly to produce kerosene, which by that time was the most important derivative in the whole country, installing the necessary machines imported from the city of New York.

Three years later, a well 60 meters deep was discovered in the town of Rubio, which they called "Pozo Eureka". This deposit began to produce 230 liters a day of a greenish material that, refined, would become kerosene and provide lighting capital San Cristóbal.

Thanks to the discovery at the Hacienda "La Alquitrana" and the Pozo Eureka, the oil industry took much more importance in the 20th century, specifically in 1904 when President Cipriano Castro approved the Code of Mines for the Nation, which gave him the faculty the president to administer and grant oil concessions.