The historic centre of Coro is a compact grid roughly 14 blocks square, surrounding the Plaza Bolívar and extending west along Calle Zamora. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 1993 as the best-preserved example of an early Spanish colonial town in the Caribbean — most of the buildings are 18th-century, built in bahareque and protected by deep eaves against the sun.
The centre is small enough to walk in a couple of hours, but rewards a slower pace: half a dozen of the merchant houses are open as museums, and the alleys between them carry the texture of the period. The whole zone is officially classified as a national monument; new construction inside the boundary is tightly controlled, which has saved Coro from the worst of late-20th-century development.