Torre de David: Inside the Skyscraper That Squatters Turned Into a City
A motorcycle climbed the first ten floors of Torre de David in the dark, its headlight sweeping across raw concrete pillars where office workers were once meant to walk. The rider passed a bodega selling rice and cooking oil, a barbershop with a real chair, a doorway where a beautician dyed hair under a bare bulb. There was no glass in most of the window openings, and through the gaps the lights of Caracas dropped away into the valley below. At the tenth floor the rider parked, because the ramps ended there, and climbed the rest of the way home on foot — up an unlit stairwell, past more families, more shops, more improvised life, to an apartment on the 22nd floor where his wife had water because someone in the building had rigged a pump to push it that high.
Nothing about the tower was supposed to be lived in. It was built to hold banks.
Torre de David is the architecture of inequality turned inside out. It rose in the early 1990s as a monument to Venezuelan oil money and financial ambition, the headquarters of a confident new economy, and it died as a hollow shell when that economy collapsed. Then the people the city had no room for moved into the bones of the dream and made it work — not as a ruin they camped in, but as a vertical neighbourhood with its own rules, its own economy, and its own grim dangers. The same impulse built the reclaimed luxury of Johannesburg's Ponte City on the far side of the planet: when the state abandons people, they will assemble the missing city themselves, even forty-five stories into the sky.
The Unfinished Dream: David Brillembourg and the 1994 Banking Crisis
The Financier Behind the Tower of David
David Brillembourg was one of the most prominent financiers in Venezuela when he broke ground on the tower in 1990. The country was riding its oil wealth, Caracas styled itself as one of Latin America's most modern capitals, and Brillembourg's Grupo Confinanzas set out to plant a flagship in the centre of it. The plan was the Centro Financiero Confinanzas — a complex crowned by a 45-story tower rising 190 metres, briefly destined to be the eighth-tallest building in Latin America. It would hold offices, a hotel, and a helipad on the roof. It was money made visible, a spike of glass and concrete announcing that Venezuela had arrived.
The tower never opened a single office. Brillembourg fell ill, and in 1993 he died of cancer, his name still attached to a building that was roughly seventy percent complete — close enough to imagine finished, far enough that finishing it would take a fortune nobody now had.
How a Death and a Banking Crash Froze Caracas's Tallest Project
The Venezuelan banking crisis hit in 1994 and finished what Brillembourg's death had started. The financial sector imploded, Grupo Confinanzas collapsed, and the state stepped in and expropriated the bankrupt company along with its half-built tower. Construction stopped where it stood. The cranes came down, the workers left, and the Centro Financiero Confinanzas was simply abandoned in the middle of a capital city — no glass in the upper floors, no elevators installed, no railings on the open edges, raw concrete exposed to the Caribbean weather.
For fifteen years it stood empty above downtown Caracas, too expensive to finish and too central to ignore. The government searched for private investors and found none. As the tower decayed, the city around it strained: by the 1990s more than half of Caracas lived in slums, the housing deficit ran into the hundreds of thousands, and a vast unfinished skyscraper sat in the middle of it all, sealed and useless. The contradiction could not hold.
How Squatters Built the World's Tallest Slum
The 2007 Takeover of Torre de David
The occupation began in October 2007, when several hundred families moved into the tower over a matter of days. The first wave was organized, and according to multiple accounts the initial push was led by ex-convicts who saw the empty structure for what it was — the largest piece of unclaimed shelter in a city desperate for it. President Hugo Chávez had spent years urging the poor to take over unused buildings and land, framing housing as a right rather than a commodity, and the squatters who claimed Torre de David did so with the implicit blessing of that politics. The state that owned the tower did not stop them.
The numbers climbed fast. What started as a few hundred families became seven hundred, then a population of more than 2,500, and at its peak the tower held an estimated 5,000 people. They occupied the structure up to the 28th floor. Above that, the building remained an empty shell open to the sky — too high to service, too dangerous to settle. The tower had become, without anyone planning it, the tallest squat on earth.
A Vertical City: Bodegas, Barbershops, and Motorcycles in the Sky
The residents did not merely shelter in Torre de David. They urbanized it. They ran electrical lines and rigged a water system that pumped supply all the way up to the 22nd floor, an engineering feat improvised by people the formal city had given up on. They opened bodegas on multiple levels so that no one had to descend twenty floors for a bag of rice. Barbershops and beauty salons appeared. A gym opened. An evangelical congregation held services inside the concrete. There was a daycare for the children and, famously, an unlicensed dentist drilling teeth somewhere in the stack.
The motorcycles solved the elevator problem. With no lifts ever installed, residents bought and shared motorbikes that ran up the building's parking ramps for the first ten floors, ferrying people and goods as high as the concrete spirals reached. Above the tenth floor, everything moved on foot and on backs — groceries, furniture, water, children — hauled up dark stairwells by people who had memorized every landing. Some residents even kept cars parked inside the lower garage levels, a detail that captures the strange completeness of the place: a slum with a parking structure, a shantytown turned on its end and stacked into the sky.
Self-Rule and Danger Inside the Tower
The tower governed itself. Residents organized a cooperative that assigned responsibilities, kept the common areas swept, posted guards at the entrance, and enforced a set of rules that outsiders found surprisingly strict — order maintained by a community that knew the authorities would not provide it. To the architects of Urban-Think Tank, who spent two years studying the building, this self-organization was the revelation: a functioning informal society engineered from nothing, the same ingenuity that built the Walled City of Kowloon into the densest place on earth.
The danger was just as real as the order. Drug gangs and housing mafias had moved through the structure in its abandoned years and never fully left, and the building carried a reputation across Caracas as a place outsiders did not enter. The architecture itself was lethal. Floors stood open to a 190-metre drop with no railings and no glass, and children fell to their deaths from those edges — the single fact that the government would later use, accurately, to justify clearing the tower. A vertical city built by hand has no building code. People lived with the view and the drop as a single condition, and some of them, especially the smallest, did not survive it.
Homeland, the Golden Lion, and the Myth of the Tower of David
Torre de David became world-famous as an idea before most outsiders ever saw inside it. In 2012, the Swiss-Venezuelan architecture collective Urban-Think Tank, working with the photographer Iwan Baan and the writer Justin McGuirk, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for an exhibition built around the tower — a serious argument that the squatters' improvised vertical city was a model worth studying rather than a disaster to be condemned. Baan's photographs of families framed in glassless concrete windows, the city falling away behind them, travelled the world. A book, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, followed in 2013, and the project provoked exactly the architectural debate its makers wanted.
The fictional version arrived almost simultaneously. The American series Homeland set a 2013 episode inside the "Tower of David," casting it as a sinister refuge for a hunted American — though the producers filmed in Puerto Rico, not in Caracas, because the real building was not a place a film crew could safely work. The tower's image had outrun the tower. Years later it would seed a novel, Damnificados, built on the legend of the occupation. The structure had become a symbol that everyone could load with their own meaning: the defeat of capitalism, the failure of socialism, the resourcefulness of the poor, the dysfunction of a collapsing state. The building obliged all of them at once.
Operation Zamora: The 2014 Eviction of Torre de David
The government emptied the tower beginning before dawn on 22 July 2014. The operation was called Operation Zamora, and the state framed it carefully. "This is not an eviction," said Ernesto Villegas, the minister overseeing it. "It's a coordinated operation, in harmony with the community in the tower." Soldiers and trucks arrived at the base of the building, and families began carrying their lives back down the stairs they had carried them up years before. The residents were relocated to new government housing in Cúa, a town roughly fifty kilometres south of Caracas — far from the jobs, transport, and supermarkets that had made the central tower so valuable to live in despite everything.
The people leaving spoke the way people speak when they are being moved from a home they were never supposed to have. Yuraima Parra, twenty-seven, held her baby daughter while soldiers loaded her belongings onto a truck in the dark. She had lived in the tower for seven years. "Necessity brought me here, and the tower gave me a good home," she said. "I'm going to miss it, but it's time to move on." Robinson Alarcon, a thirty-four-year-old caterer who had spent five years on the ninth floor, was leaving with his wife and three children, and what he remembered was not the danger but the height. "The view was so beautiful," he said.
Humberto Hidalgo had lived on the seventh floor with his wife and ten children for six years, after years on the street before that. He watched the eviction begin and choked back tears, holding onto the one thing the state had promised him. "We still don't know where we're going, nor how long we'll stay here," he said. "But I know our president will give us a proper house." The government announced that Torre de David would now be transformed into the commercial and office tower it was always meant to be. That transformation never happened.
Torre de David Today: The Leaning, Empty Ghost of Caracas
The tower stood empty after 2014, its promised rebirth abandoned like every plan before it. Chinese banks were reported to have considered buying and completing the structure, and that prospect, like the rest, came to nothing. Venezuela slid deeper into economic collapse through the following years, and a half-finished skyscraper with no investors and no occupants was nobody's priority. The building that had once held 5,000 people held no one.
The earth finished the story the economy started. On 21 August 2018, the strongest earthquake to strike Venezuela in a century hit Caracas, and the top five floors of Torre de David tilted outward by 25 degrees, partially collapsing. The skeleton that squatters had turned into a city now leaned visibly over the skyline, a literal monument to instability, condemned and at risk of further collapse. No one was inside to be hurt — the eviction had seen to that four years earlier.
Torre de David remains where it has always been, incomplete since 1994, occupied and emptied, famous and feared, leaning over downtown Caracas as of 2025. It is the rare building that has been a symbol of three different failures in sequence — the collapse of a financial boom, the dysfunction of a state that could neither finish nor demolish it, and the ingenuity of people forced to house themselves inside the wreckage of all of it. The tower has outlasted the bank that built it, the families who saved it from emptiness, and the government that cleared them out. It is still standing, and it is still wrong, a vertical record of a city that could not stop failing the same way.
The Atlas Entry: Visiting Torre de David
Torre de David is not a site that can be visited in any ordinary sense. It is an empty, structurally compromised skyscraper, condemned after the 2018 earthquake, sealed off and leaning over a part of central Caracas that demands serious caution on its own terms. Venezuela's ongoing political and economic crisis makes independent travel to the country difficult and, in stretches, dangerous, and the area around the tower is not a place to wander with a camera. There are no tours of the interior. There is no observation deck. The building is a hazard, not an attraction.
The tower can be seen, and that is the honest extent of it. Its silhouette dominates the downtown skyline, and its tilted upper floors are visible from across the valley — best understood from a distance, in the context of the dense city it presides over, rather than approached. Anyone determined to see it should do so only with trusted local guidance and a clear understanding of the security situation, which shifts and should be checked against current advisories before any travel to Caracas is considered at all.
The deeper reckoning at Torre de David is not architectural. The building asks its observers to hold the same two truths that Ponte does — that this was raised as a monument to wealth that excluded most of the people who would later live in it, and that for seven years it was a genuine home to thousands who had nowhere else, complete with the small dignities of barbershops and birthday parties and a view that a man remembered more clearly than the danger. The state called the eviction a rescue, and children had in fact died on those open floors. The residents called it the loss of the best home they had known. Both were telling the truth. The tower leans over Caracas now with no one to argue the point, holding the whole contradiction in its tilted concrete, a city that the poor finished and the state could only empty.
Frequently Asked Questions About Torre de David
What is Torre de David and where is it located?
Torre de David is an unfinished 45-story skyscraper in downtown Caracas, Venezuela, officially named the Centro Financiero Confinanzas. It rises 190 metres and was intended to be a flagship financial complex when construction began in 1990. The project was abandoned in 1994 after the death of its developer and a national banking crisis, leaving the tower roughly seventy percent complete. It became famous worldwide after squatters occupied it and turned it into what was widely called the world's tallest slum.
Why is it called the Tower of David?
The building is named after David Brillembourg, the prominent Venezuelan financier who developed it and served as its principal investor. Brillembourg began construction in 1990 but died of cancer in 1993 before the tower was completed. His name stayed attached to the structure even after his company collapsed and the state took it over, and "Torre de David" became the popular name by which the building is known across Venezuela and beyond.
How did people live inside Torre de David?
Squatters who occupied the tower from 2007 built a functioning vertical community inside the concrete shell. They rigged electricity and a water system that reached up to the 22nd floor, opened bodegas, barbershops, beauty salons, a gym, a church, and even an unlicensed dental practice across the occupied levels. With no elevators ever installed, residents used motorcycles to travel up the building's parking ramps for the first ten floors and climbed stairs above that. At its peak the tower housed an estimated 5,000 people living up to the 28th floor.
Why were the residents evicted from Torre de David?
The Venezuelan government cleared the tower in July 2014 in an operation called Operation Zamora, citing the building's danger — children had fallen to their deaths from floors that stood open to a 190-metre drop with no railings or glass. Officials relocated the families to new government housing in Cúa, a town about fifty kilometres south of Caracas. The state announced plans to convert the tower into the commercial center it was originally designed to be, but that transformation never took place.
What happened to Torre de David after the earthquake?
On 21 August 2018, the largest earthquake to hit Venezuela in a century struck Caracas and caused the top five floors of Torre de David to tilt outward by about 25 degrees, partially collapsing. The building had been empty since the 2014 eviction, so there were no casualties inside. It remains standing, incomplete, condemned, and visibly leaning over downtown Caracas, with its future unresolved as of 2025.
Was Torre de David really in Homeland?
Torre de David inspired a 2013 episode of the American series Homeland titled "Tower of David," which used the building as a refuge for a hunted character. The episode was not actually filmed in the real tower — the production shot in Puerto Rico, because the genuine building in Caracas was unsafe and inaccessible for a film crew. The tower also won international acclaim through the architecture collective Urban-Think Tank, whose study of it earned the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Sources
Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities — Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner, Urban-Think Tank / Lars Müller Publishers (2013)
The Tower of David: A Vertical Slum in Caracas — Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker (2013)
Ingenious Homes in Unexpected Places — Iwan Baan, TEDCity2.0 (2013)
Fall of the Tower of David: Squatters Leave Venezuela's Vertical Slum — NPR / Associated Press (2014)
Venezuela Moves to Empty Tower of David Skyscraper Slum — Agence France-Presse (2014)
Tower of David: Urban Survival Creativity — Ramón Iriarte, Works That Work (2014)
Torre David: Evictions — Daniel Schwartz (Urban-Think Tank), ICON Magazine (2014)
Last Floors of the Infamous Torre de David Have Tilted Following an Earthquake — Nicolás Valencia, ArchDaily (2018)
Torre David (documentary film) — Urban-Think Tank, Golden Lion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2012)
Damnificados — JJ Amaworo Wilson, PM Press (2016)
