The local statistics have led people like former Planning Minister Ricardo Martinez to despair, ''There is no solution for Caracas's problems.'' There are more than 600,000 automobiles to clog its arteries, and nearly four million people live here. By the year 2000 it is expected that there will be six million people.

The mountains that ring the city prohibit any spreading out of the population beyond the 77-square-mile basin, and the only direction to move has been up. More than 40 percent of Caracas's residents live in high-rises. Another 30 percent inhabit brick buildings in chockablock hillside slums known as ranchos.

Jobs and relatively high wages attracted thousands of immigrants here from Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Guyana and Trinidad. ''This was a responsibility that no other Latin city has had to take on,'' Arturo Uslar Pietri, a leading Venezuelan intellectual, said. ''One of the ranchos is called Guayaquilito, and in another, they hoist the Colombian flag each morning.''

Aura Mayoral, a former television producer, said her channel used to have trouble conducting opinion-gauging interviews in the street because so many people who were stopped downtown were not Venezuelans.

City fathers have made headway in recent years in improving public services that regularly used to leave vast sections of Caracas without power or water. Garbage no longer clutters streets as it once did since private haulers were contracted to cart it away. By the end of March, 8.7 miles of a proposed 26-mile-long subway will be functioning.

A year-round mean temperature of 68.4 degrees, average humidity of 78 percent and a steady breeze justifies Caraquenos' claim to living in ''eternal springtime,'' even if the only things permanently in bud seem to be new high-rises.

In fact, in those parts of the city that concrete has not covered over, wild orchids, acacias and other flowers bloom in such abundance that the guide to the city published by the Venezuelan American Association of University Women includes a list of varieties that are dangerous. Eating the seeds of a tree called the monkey cup, it warns, can cause baldness.