Geologists had known for years that something valuable lay beneath the Zulia lowlands east of Lake Maracaibo. Oil seeps in the region attracted attention as early as 1909, when John Allen Tregelles, representing the English firm The Venezuela Development Company, secured an immense petroleum reserve covering some 270,000 square kilometers during the government of General Juan Vicente Gomez. By 1912, the lawyer Rafael Max Valladares had acquired the concession and transferred it to the Caribbean Petroleum Company, a New York-based subsidiary of the General Asphalt Company that was later absorbed by Royal Dutch Shell. That September, the American geologist Ralph Arnold arrived with a team to survey the terrain, ultimately recommending immediate drilling in the Zumaque area on the lands of the Zumaque hacienda.

Construction began in April 1914 on an anticline of La Estrella hill, named for the star-shaped drilling machine hauled into position. The jungle had to be cleared by hand. The workers used a site-built timber derrick and a hammer drill, primitive equipment even by the standards of the day. Reservoir pressure proved difficult to control, and the well blew out before the crew could master it. Blowouts were common in early drilling, but these men had no prior experience with oil. By July 25, crude began flowing naturally from the Miocene formation at 135 meters. Six days later, on July 31, the well was declared commercially useful, producing 264 barrels per day of heavy, 18-degree API crude. The oil age in Venezuela had begun.

Success at Zumaque I forced rapid industrialization. In 1917, the Caribbean Petroleum Company built the San Lorenzo Refinery in the nearby lake town of San Timoteo, with a capacity of 8,000 barrels per day, the first refinery in Venezuela and among the most modern of its era. But wealth did not flow evenly. Mene Grande became a center of labor unrest, creating one of Venezuela's first oil workers' unions in 1925, which was immediately suppressed by the Gomez dictatorship. One year after the dictator's death, on December 14, 1936, workers at Zumaque I called the first large-scale oil strike in Venezuelan history. General Eleazar Lopez Contreras responded with harsh repression, but the seed of organized labor in the petroleum sector had been planted.

On January 1, 1976, President Carlos Andres Perez chose the Zumaque I wellsite as the stage for nationalizing Venezuela's oil industry. The assets of Royal Dutch Shell and other foreign operators became the property of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and its subsidiary Maraven. It was a symbolic homecoming: the well that had started it all, returning to Venezuelan hands. The symbolism would be tested again. In 1996, during the Oil Opening under President Rafael Caldera, the field passed to Spain's Repsol under an operating agreement. Then in 2007, President Hugo Chavez reversed course with a sweeping renationalization, and Zumaque I became property of Petroquiriquire, a joint venture between Repsol and PDVSA. Through every political turn, the old well kept producing.

A plaque at the site commemorates both the 1914 discovery and the 1976 nationalization. As of 2014, the centennial of its drilling, Zumaque I still produced between 18 and 20 barrels daily, a trickle by modern standards but a powerful symbol of continuity. The well sits a few kilometers from the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, in the Baralt Municipality of Zulia state, surrounded by the same lowland terrain that the original crew hacked through with machetes. Venezuela's relationship with oil has brought booms and busts, sovereignty and dependence, strikes and dictatorships. Zumaque I has outlasted all of it, still drawing crude from the same shallow formation that changed a nation's trajectory.