Nestled among a kaleidoscope of overlapping shanty homes and mountains cloaked in dense forestry, a giant pyramid-shaped building — once touted to become a world-leading retail mecca — towers over Caracas.
With a name derived from its stunning spiral shape, the four-hectare structure was designed, built and sold as Venezuela's answer for modern architecture that would revolutionise the capital.
Spanish artist Salvador Dali offered to decorate it with his art and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda described the building as "one of the most exquisite creations ever to have sprung from the mind of an architect".
Within years, El Helicoide's construction would grind to a halt.
Within decades, it was converted into a prison that housed acts of torture and crimes against humanity, according to firsthand accounts from dozens of inmates who were held there.
A 'tropical Acropolis' sandwiched into a Venezuelan valley
El Helicoide was first devised in 1955 and designed over 12 months by architects Dirk Bornhorst, Pedro Neuberger and Jorge Romero Gutierrez as a modern, "state-of-the-art" development that would rival the architectural ingenuity of the United States.
[DW US-VZ]The structure continues to visually dwarf the neighbouring slums that dot the hills of the southern Caracas suburbs of Los Pasajes and La Ceiba.
The idea to create a mammoth building inspired by the biblical Tower of Babel followed 30 years of economic prosperity in Venezuela spurred by lucrative oil production revenues.
[DW Helicoide]It also coincided with the installation of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez — an anti-communist military dictator "bent on modernising Caracas" — as the nation's president, according to Venezuelan scholar and historian Celeste Olalquiaga.
"This concrete building — constructed in 1960 as a drive-in mall, [was] the only one of its kind, where drivers could spiral up and down, parking right in front of the business of their choice," Ms Olalquiaga wrote in a 2015 column for the New York art and culture magazine Cabinet.
At an initial cost of $US10 million ($14.9 million), the structure was designed to include a car showroom, gym, swimming pool, restaurants, nurseries, nightclubs, a cinema, a hotel to house staff members of the country's major airlines and a helipad to fly their passengers to Caracas's airport, and an innovative diagonal internal elevator system designed to work in the same way as a funicular.
The massive dome placed on the building's roof was also designed to house exhibitions that would showcase Venezuela's booming national industries: oil, gas, aluminium and agriculture.
The University of Virginia's Lisa Blackmore co-edited a book with Ms Olalquiaga focused on El Helicoide. She says the building "landed like a spaceship" in the middle of Caracas's rapid modern architecture revolution.
"It is a real enigma at the same time as it is this absolute icon," Dr Blackmore told the ABC.
"It has this really contradictory status — a thing very visible and extremely eye-catching in terms of its design and its presence in the landscape; at the same time, it is this dark site that we know so little about."
The entire structure sits atop a 3-hectare hill known as La Roca Tarpeya, named after the Italian Tarpeian Rock used by Ancient Romans as a cliffside execution site.
"El Helicoide was an instant hit," Ms Olalquiaga wrote.
"La Roca Tarpeya was sculpted inch by inch in order to fit El Helicoide hand in glove … Photos of the model appeared on the front page of foreign newspapers and occupied a prominent place at [New York City's] Museum of Modern Art's 1961 Roads exhibition."
In 1958, a rapid political shift sparked by the overthrowing of General Jiménez's regime spelt the beginning of El Helicoide's gradual decline.
"It was then abandoned to a fate that included oblivion and decay; multiple failed governmental projects, occupation by squatters and intelligence police; and episodes of drugs, sex and torture," Ms Olalquiaga wrote.
Modern colossus becomes homeless haven
General Jiménez's ousting had a generational impact on the viability of El Helicoide's construction, according to Ms Olalquiaga.
The provisional military government that replaced him continued to fund its creation until early 1959, but the later-elected government of Rómulo Betancourt refused to continue the legacy of a dictator and the money dried up.
Over the next two decades, municipal governments drew up 27 different plans to keep the spectacle alive, including ideas such as an art museum, tourist centre and national library. None of them were ever completed.
"During the next 20 years, the construction that had made international headlines stood in almost total silence," Ms Olalquiaga wrote.
"Spurred by the official relocation of 500 landslide refugees in El Helicoide in 1979, small groups began to install themselves in the building. By 1982, the unfinished structure was home to some 12,000 squatters."
Over those three years, informal settlements of people were located within 150 shipping containers that were moved onto the ramps of El Helicoide. The period was described as "the great occupation", according to Dr Blackmore.
"People were there in very precarious circumstances … but people made their lives in all adversity as well," she said.
"We've got images of people hanging out their washing on the ramps of the building … School kids lined up doing sports in this building.
"That is a really, extremely striking story to witness."
She also believes the constant change in presidencies and shifts in the political persuasions of leaders turned El Helicoide into a "stunted dream".
"The fact that this building could be so many things meant that it never really had the opportunity to have its own story," she said.
"This all-encompassing vision that this building was supposed to materialise just could not come to be."
'Highway to consumer heaven' evolved into a 'stairway to hell'
Two years later, and almost three decades after it was first envisioned, El Helicoide was given another national purpose.
It became the rented headquarters of Venezuela's domestic intelligence and surveillance agency, the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services — now known as the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service.
The agency converted the building into a detention centre, installed high-tech surveillance equipment, turned retail spaces in the building's lower levels into prison cells and began imprisoning hundreds of political detainees.
After the turn of the century and the election of Venezuela's first socialist president, former military lieutenant colonel Hugo Chavez, the country was accused of committing acts of repression and human rights abuses.
Warning: This article makes reference to details of torture and physical abuse.
In 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a judgment in the case of a man held as a prisoner at El Helicoide for more than six years. It assessed his imprisonment conditions and declared prisoners were subjected to "extremely poor" cell environments.
After Nicolás Maduro's 2013 presidential election, waves of protests broke out in Venezuela, in which thousands were arrested. More than 3,000 were taken to El Helicoide, the BBC reported.
It was throughout Mr Maduro's regime that allegations of torture intensified.
Amnesty International says the government conducted a systematic process of "enforced disappearances" of opponents and civilians.
In 2020, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights accused almost 800 government security personnel of committing human rights violations and torture.
"The actual number of cases could be significantly higher," the office said in a report submitted to the United Nations General Assembly.
"Documented cases included severe beatings with boards, suffocation with plastic bags and chemicals, submerging the head of the victim under water, electric shocks to the eyelids and sexual violence in the form of electric shocks to genitalia.
"Detainees were also exposed to cold temperatures and/or constant electric light, handcuffed and/or blindfolded for long periods of time, and subjected to death threats against themselves and their relatives."
Rosmit Mantilla, a former prisoner who was held in El Helicoide for 10 days in 2014 and later went on to become an elected congressman, told the BBC in 2019 there were just 50 detainees in the building at that time.
Over the following two years, that number ballooned to at least 300 and forced guards to place detainees in improvised cells converted from office toilets and empty staircase space, he said.
Mr Mantilla collated prisoners' testimonies after his release.
He said he found cases of people having bags of human excrement placed on their heads and being forced to breathe in, others who were blindfolded and had guns held at their heads by guards, and some who were sexually abused with blunt objects.
Another prisoner, Victor Navarro, was detained in El Helicoide for six months in 2018. He told The New York Times he was held in a cell measuring less than 4 metres by 4 metres, with 16 other people.
He claims he was routinely beaten, deprived of sunlight and had a gun placed in his mouth by a laughing guard.
After his release, he fled to Argentina, wrote a book about his experiences and created a virtual reality product based on other prisoners' testimonies that has been showcased globally to show participants a 3D recreation of what life was like inside El Helicoide.
Human Rights Watch said in September last year it was aware of at least 13 political prisoners being held incommunicado in detention without access to legal representation or family contact.
Of those, 11 were known to have been taken to El Helicoide, including former presidential candidates, opposition leaders and the son-in-law of Edmundo González — who the Venezuelan opposition says defeated Mr Maduro at the 2024 presidential election.
An anxious wait for answers
On January 5, the Venezuelan human rights organisation Foro Penal said it knew of at least 806 political prisoners being held in detention.
After Mr Maduro's capture by US forces, lawyers working with the organisation said on Sunday they had verified the release of at least 151 of those prisoners by the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez.
Nine days later and almost a fortnight after the US removed Mr Maduro, Ms Rodríguez approached a microphone on a red carpet at the presidential Miraflores Palace in central Caracas.
Flanked by her brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, and political ally, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, she declared there would be "a new political moment".
It would include the progressive release of prisoners from facilities such as El Helicoide, she said.
In the days that followed, relatives of the imprisoned began to line streets surrounding the gigantic building.
About 5 kilometres away from the palace, they waited on cracked concrete footpaths next to a bus stop and a small fruit cart placed on an unevenly-paved road for sporadic updates from the government and Foro Penal about which prisoners had been freed.
Many, carrying posters or images on their mobile phones that showed the faces of their relatives, said they had hope they would see their loved ones again, but were unsure of their location.
"They took him from home, and we don't know where. That was on September 23, and until now, I don't know where they are keeping my son," Marile Rodriguez Alvarado, the mother of a man named Jose, told Reuters.
"That's why I'm here, I just arrived, hoping that my son is here. That's what I came for, for help."
A decade ago, Ms Olalquiaga wrote: "El Helicoide stands for exactly the opposite of what it was built to be."
"Instead of a dynamic centre of exchange that might have revitalised the area and its surroundings, the building grew melancholically inward, fated, like an obsessive thought, to repeat its failure over and over again.
"Rather than expansive, it became sinister, a threatening fortress of 'law and order' in a country that endemically ignores both.
