Forging Venezuela

Since 2019, La Caravana Escuela has taught the craft of iron forging to more than 800 farmers and students, helping to significantly improve planting and harvesting methods in the fields, as well as productivity, creativity, and quality of life in their communities.

We have established nine fully equipped rural workshops in the rural communities of Gavidia, Mucubají, Piñango, Los Nevados, Mucurubá, La Culata, Chacantá, and Capurí, as well as at three technical schools: ETAS Barinas, ETAS Mucurubá, and San Javier del Valle.

Without the need for electricity, our pedal-powered forges stoke the coal fire to heat the iron to 1,000 degrees Celsius. To date, we have forged more than 30,000 tools in total, recycling some 25 metric tons of iron.

In seven years of continuous operation, we have gone from producing basic tools to forging products of export quality. The process of forging and shaping these special automotive-grade steels gives our tools exceptional toughness and quality.

In the face of the fleeting empire of obsolescence—marked by the disposable and the temporary—at La Caravana Escuela , we work toward a humanity that embraces manual craftsmanship, learns it, and develops it to improve its life, transforming industrial scrap into reliable and durable tools.

Offering an alternative path to the overwhelming control of algorithms and artificial intelligence, La Caravana is an oasis that promotes training in manual trades and practical skills, building bonds of brotherhood that are forged in the smithies and strengthened through shared work and the achievement of established goals. The teaching, management, and production model of La Caravana Escuela is growing steadily and proving its validity and relevance every day. The way knowledge is transmitted within La Caravana Escuela—from person to person, from workshop to workshop—echoes the central idea that the 2025 Nobel laureates in Economics emphasize in their research on economic growth: Sustained development depends not only on major inventions or financial capital, but on ecosystems where technical and practical knowledge circulates, adapts, and accumulates over time.