Rio Caribe colonial townhouse

Rio Caribe is a small pastel-coloured port on the north coast of Sucre state, at the neck of the Paria peninsula — the greenest, wettest and least visited corner of the Venezuelan Caribbean. It made its money in cocoa, and it still does: the criollo beans grown in the hills behind town are among the finest in the world. What that history left behind is a seafront of nineteenth-century townhouses with tall shuttered windows, deep verandahs and interior courtyards, selling for less than a studio flat almost anywhere else on this coast.

This house is one of them, restored rather than modernised. A hundred and sixty square metres over one level: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a long living room with the original beamed ceiling, a big kitchen and a planted central courtyard that pulls the breeze through the whole building. Cement tiles on the floors, wooden shutters, iron window grilles, a rear service patio with laundry and a water tank. It is three hundred metres from the malecon and the fishing harbour, and the town beach is a five-minute walk.

The real draw is what lies east of town. Playa Medina and Playa Pui Puy, twenty to forty minutes away on the coast road, are two of the most beautiful beaches in the country — deep crescents of golden sand backed by coconut groves and forested hills, with leatherback turtles nesting between April and August. Inland, cloud forest, waterfalls and cocoa haciendas climb towards the Paria ridge; offshore, fishermen will take you to the Gulf of Paria or out towards Trinidad, which is visible on a clear day.

Life in Rio Caribe is small-town and inexpensive. There is a market, bakeries, pharmacies, a clinic and a handful of restaurants doing pescado frito, empanadas de cazon and cocoa in every possible form. Carupano, thirty minutes west, has the hospital, banks, supermarkets and an airport with domestic flights; Caracas is a long drive or a short hop via Carupano or Maturin.

Buying needs care. Use a lawyer in Carupano to run the registry search, confirm the taxes are clear and check that older family titles are properly consolidated; transactions are typically in cash dollars. Restoration costs are low because labour and local hardwood are cheap, but humidity is high and old roofs need attention, so budget for the roof before the kitchen. In exchange you own a piece of colonial Caribbean architecture in a town where nothing is manufactured for tourists and the beaches down the road are empty on a Tuesday.