🇻🇪 Venezuela · The East, Caribbean and Islands
Isla La Tortuga is Venezuela's second-largest island after Margarita, an uninhabited Caribbean island belonging to the Federal Dependencies, lying north of Anzoátegui state. It's an almost untouched paradise of white sand, clear water and reefs, with no villages and no permanent infrastructure, which makes it an exclusive and genuinely wild destination.
Flat, arid and empty, La Tortuga is known for beaches such as Punta Delgada and Cayo Herradura, with sandbars, lagoons and water of an intense turquoise. Because nobody lives there, you visit mainly on sailing, yacht or light-aircraft trips, camping or staying aboard, which keeps it a destination for nature, sailing and fishing.
This guide covers the essentials of Isla La Tortuga: what the island and its beaches are like, how you visit (boat, light aircraft), what there is to do, what the packages cost, what to bring to an island with no services, and how to plan a trip to this wild corner of the Venezuelan Caribbean.
Isla La Tortuga is an uninhabited island in the Venezuelan Caribbean, the country's second largest, belonging to the Federal Dependencies. Historically it drew pirates, fishermen and adventurers, and today it's an almost pristine nature destination reached by sea or air. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Venezuela's nationally administered Caribbean islands: the coral paradise of Los Roques, solitary La Tortuga, strategic Isla de Aves and dozens of turquoise-water cays and islets, land of pearls, salt, sea turtles and seabirds.
Read the history of Dependencias Federales →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Isla La Tortuga is Venezuela's second-largest island after Margarita, but unlike Margarita it remains uninhabited and all but untouched. It forms part of the Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, the group of Caribbean islands and archipelagos administered directly by the national government, and lies in the Caribbean Sea north of Anzoátegui state.
It's a flat, low, arid island with a dry climate and scrub vegetation, ringed by long white-sand beaches, sandbars and cays such as Herradura and Los Tortuguillos. Its water, an intense and very clear turquoise, and its reefs hold rich marine life, which makes it a natural paradise.
The absence of any permanent population or infrastructure is precisely what defines its character: a wild, intact corner of the Venezuelan Caribbean, nothing like the tourist islands. Its name, La Tortuga —'the turtle'— refers to the sea turtles that historically frequented its waters and beaches.
Uninhabited though it is today, La Tortuga has not sat outside history. Through the colonial centuries, the islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean were frequented by pirates, privateers and smugglers of every nation, who used them as shelter, anchorage and base of operations. La Tortuga, given its position and its waters, was one of those points on the Caribbean routes.
The island also drew, at different moments, fishermen and people looking to work resources such as the salt in its lagoons, as well as the sea turtles that gave it its name. There were attempts to exploit it and temporary presences of adventurers and vessels from several powers with an interest in these strategic islands.
None of that, however, produced a stable settlement. The island's aridity, the lack of fresh water and its remoteness prevented any permanent population from taking hold, so La Tortuga kept its character as a deserted island across the centuries, visited only occasionally.
In modern times, La Tortuga has established itself as an exclusive sailing destination and a piece of almost untouched nature. Precisely because it is uninhabited, with no hotels, villages or services, it attracts a particular kind of visitor: sailors, sport fishermen and sea lovers after solitary beaches and clear water far from mass tourism.
The usual way to visit is on multi-day voyages by sailing boat or yacht, leaving from mainland ports —above all Higuerote, in Miranda state—, staying aboard and stopping at different beaches and cays such as Herradura, Sombrero, Los Juanes and Cayo Muerto. Others fly in to its rough landing strip and camp. Either way, everything —water, food, fuel— has to be brought along, because the island offers no permanent infrastructure at all.
That wild, exclusive character has for decades been both La Tortuga's greatest attraction and its main limitation: it offers a Caribbean experience that is hard to match, but one reserved for those who can organize or afford an expedition by sea or air.
The island's name is no accident: La Tortuga owes it to the sea turtles that for centuries frequented its warm waters and nested on its white-sand beaches. Species such as the green turtle, the hawksbill and the loggerhead found a natural refuge on its little-disturbed shores, and although historical pressure from fishermen and whalers cut their numbers, the absence of permanent settlements helped the island keep a sanctuary quality that is being valued again today.
La Tortuga is not one island but the centerpiece of a small archipelago. Scattered around it are cays and islets such as Cayo Herradura, Cayo Ratón, Los Palanquinos and, above all, Los Tortuguillos, two coral islets to the northeast where an old lighthouse stands that guided sailors of the central Caribbean for decades. The sandbars that surface and shift with the tides, the shallow inland lagoons and the reefs ringing the island form a mosaic of enormously rich habitats.
Below the surface, La Tortuga's waters hold seagrass meadows, corals, moray eels, groupers, snappers, lobsters and a fauna that has made the island a coveted destination for divers and sport fishermen. That combination of isolation, clear water and biodiversity is, at bottom, the same reason the island fascinated pirates and fishermen in the past and draws sailors today: a piece of Caribbean that time has barely touched.
In August 2023, the government of Nicolás Maduro signed the creation of the Isla La Tortuga Special Economic Zone (ZEE), presenting it as one of the most ambitious tourism projects in the Caribbean and in Venezuela. The plan takes in the construction of ten resorts, an international airport, a pier, a fishing village, a hospital, seawater desalination plants and renewable energy systems, all under what the authorities describe as a sustainable and regenerative approach.
A single authority was appointed for the zone —initially rear admiral Aníbal Coronado Millán and, from December 2024, Alí Padrón— with the declared aim of turning La Tortuga into a high-end tourist destination and diversifying the Venezuelan economy beyond oil. The project has been presented repeatedly as part of a long-term national strategy.
The island, however, has no basic infrastructure whatsoever —no fresh water, no grid electricity, no buildings— which implies a very large upfront investment. Specialist outlets have noted that, like other special economic zones announced in the country, the project has advanced more slowly than planned, held back by financing, macroeconomic stability and the international context. The political turn of January 2026 —with the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the zone's chief promoter— added a large question mark over the future of a megaproject entirely bound up with the government that launched it. In the meantime, La Tortuga goes on receiving visitors almost exclusively through traditional sailing and air tourism, in its natural, untouched state: for better or worse, the deserted island that captivated pirates and sailors keeps its wildness, for now.