This thesis presents the results of an integrated interpretation, using surface geology, well data, and regional documentation, to determine the structural style and basin evolution along a transect of the Maturin subbasin. It extends for about I 10 km, from the San Francisco fault on the North to the deformation front. The Maturin subbasin was created by middle Miocene, after a transcollision between the eastward-moving Caribbean plate and the Cretaceous-through-Oligocene passive margin of northeastern Venezuela. This plate convergence produced a crustal flexure which was filled with a thick section of deep-water Carapita Formation shales, from early through the earliest middle Miocene. Then, the uplift of the fold-thrust-belt Interior range occurred, creating a set of in-sequence imbricate fault-bend-folds that formed the floor-thrust sheets of the Maturin subbasin, involving a section from lower Cretaceous to middle Miocene rocks. On seismic lines, this event is marked by conspicuous offlaps underlying the non-thrusted uppermost middle Miocene. By late Miocene, the activity of the dextral strike-slip San Francisco fault created a concentric-overturned fold system that outcrops on the surface transect. The floor-thrust fault of this system transferred its slip through the roof thrust of the trailing thrusts. This stress created an internal wedge-thrust zone that was contemporaneously active with the late Miocene through early Pliocene sedimentation. This event was marked by conspicuous offlaps on the backlimb of the growing structure, and onlaps on the forelimb. The youngest deformations in the basin are located on the deformation front. This was an active wedge thrust that uplifted and folded an overlying upper Oligocene to lower Pliocene section. These units are the same ones that lie horizontally on the platform. During late Pliocene, further deformation created a stacked anticfine updip of the wedge backthrust with synsedimentary growth, as suggested by offlaps on the forelimb of the antichne.

The density model corroborates the thin-skinned thrust model of deformation that resulted from the interpretation of seismic, well and surface data. This modelling suggests that the inverted-bell shape of the gravity anomaly across the Maturin subbasin is due to the presence of a graben structure underneath the basin, which may correspond to the eastward extension of the Paleozoic-early Mesozoic Espino graben. The minimun amount of shortening required for this model was estimated as 44 km (38%).