El Silencio is the western end of the colonial core — the district between Plaza Bolívar and the Centro Simón Bolívar towers. The name comes from a colonial-era yellow-fever epidemic that emptied the district. In the late 1940s the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva designed a major social-housing redevelopment here: seven curved apartment blocks around a central plaza, organised around colonial-style arcades. The project — the Reurbanización El Silencio — was Venezuela's first big experiment in modern public housing and is still in use.
The district packs in much of what visitors come to the centre to see — Plaza Bolívar, the Cathedral, the Capitolio, the Casa Amarilla, the Iglesia de San Francisco, the Centro Simón Bolívar Towers, and the surrounding government buildings. Walk it by day, ideally in the morning, and with a local who knows the streets.