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Llanos

:''Los Llanos redirect here, for the Chilean region see: Los Llanos, Chile'' Los '''Llanos''' (meaning the flat plains) is a vast tropical grassland plain situated at the east of the Andes in northwestern South America (Colombia and Venezuela). Its main river is the Orinoco. Despite poor climate, during the colonial era, llaneros (similar to the gauchos of the pampas) herded millions of heads of cattle here. The area slopes gradually away from the highland areas that surround it; elevation AMSL in the llanos never exceeds 200 meters. Originally, ''llano'' is the Spanish word for ''plain''. It became the Spanish-American term for prairie. Journalist Alan Weisman wrote a book entitled ''Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World'' about a community of individuals that develop a self-sustainable society in Los Llanos, Colombia despite the fact Los Llanos is, "the most inhospitable environment on earth." One of the main characters in the book, and the brain behind the Gaviotas community, is Paolo Lugari. Lugari wanted to show that if a self-sustainable community could be built in Los Llanos, it could be done anywhere. In Texas, the dry grassland in the western part of the state is know as the Llano Estacado (in Spanish, "staked plain").