Population Geography focuses on the number, composition, and distribution of human beings in relation to variations in the conditions of earth space. Population dynamics such as growth settlement patterns, and migration, combined with natural resources distribution and utilization, are major causes of differences among regions. Although the rate of population increases slowing after 50 years of rapid increases, the world’s total population will continue to expand and place pressure on resources.

Sixth in size among the Latin American countries, Venezuela was one of the Western Hemisphere's least densely populated countries. But despite a low overall population density (30.4 persons per square kilometer in 2007), distribution was extremely uneven. Most of its more than 20 million inhabitants were concentrated in the western Andean region and along the coast. Although nearly half of the land area lies south and east of the Río Orinoco, that area contained only about 4 percent of the population in the late 1980s. About 75 percent of the total population lived in only 20 percent of the national territory, mainly in the northern mountains (Caracas and surrounding areas) and the Maracaibo lowlands. According to the United Nations Urban Agglomerations report in 2003, Caracas with 32 million inhabitants was the tenth large urban center in Latin America. In the 1990s, the north, the site of most of the country's first colonial cities, agricultural estates, and urban settlements, remained the administrative, economic, and social heartland of the country. Most of the population was concentrated along the coast and in the valleys of the coastal mountain ranges, and about one of every five Venezuelans lived in Caracas. Only three major inland urban centers existed in the early 1990s: Barquisimeto, Ciudad Guayana, and Valencia. This concentration of population persisted in spite of a number of government programs that provided incentives to relocate industry and tried to expand educational opportunities throughout the rest of the country.

Cultural Geography

To some writers in newspapers ad popular press, culture means the art (literature, painting, music, etc.). To a social scientist, culture is specialized behavioral patterns, understandings, and adaptations that summarize the way of life a group of people. In this broader sense, culture is as much a part of regional differentiation of the earth as are topography, climate, and other aspects of the physical environment. The visible and invisible evidences of culture – buildings and farm patterns, language and political organization- are elements in the spatial diversity that invites and is subject to geographic inquiry. Cultural differences in area result in human landscapes with variations as subtle as the differing “feel” of urban Paris Moscow, and New York or as obvious as the sharp contrasts of rural Zimbabwe and the Prairie Provinces of Canada. Because such differences exist, cultural geography exists, and one branches of cultural geography addresses a whole range of “why?” and “what?” and “how?” questions.