The Skeleton Coast. Alexander Apóstol

In the late 1980s on Isla de Margarita, the spearhead of tourism in Venezuela, there was a real estate boom in hotels and holiday homes based on successive rises and falls of the petroleum industry in the midst of corruption, a weak economy and money laundering.

While being built, many of these tourist complexes went bankrupt due to the successive economic crises in the 1990s, leaving many of these structures abandoned throughout the city of Porlamar and on the various beaches on the island.

Thus they provide the unsuspecting tourist with a landscape which on first sight looks as if the building industry is in full swing given the huge amount of sites “under construction”, but upon closer inspection the rusty pillars and weeds and litter surrounding them give the game away.

These buildings provide a parallel view of the country’s very own institutional structures.