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Angel Falls
The world's tallest waterfall, plunging nearly a kilometre from a Venezuelan tepui
Angel Falls drops from the lip of a flat-topped mountain in remote southeastern Venezuela for 979 metres, the tallest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth. So great is the plunge that the water, falling from the summit of the Auyan-tepui, breaks into mist and is carried off by the wind before it reaches the jungle far below, especially in the dry season. To witness it is to see a river vanish into vapour against a sheer red-rock cliff streaked with the green of clinging plants.
The falls pour off the Auyan-tepui, one of the great tabletop mountains, or tepuis, of the Guiana Highlands, ancient sandstone plateaus among the oldest rock formations on Earth. Their summits, isolated for millions of years, host strange endemic plants found nowhere else, evoking a lost world. Kerepakupai Meru, as the falls are known in the Pemon language, drains into the Churun River and the surrounding Canaima National Park, a vast UNESCO World Heritage rainforest threaded with rivers and dotted with these flat-topped giants.
The Pemon people long knew the falls, but they reached the wider world through the American aviator Jimmie Angel, who in 1933 spotted the cascade while searching for gold and later crash-landed his plane atop the tepui in 1937, lending the falls his name. In 2009 Venezuela's president promoted the Indigenous name Kerepakupai Meru. Reaching the base still requires a river journey deep into the rainforest, and the falls remain among the most spectacular and least accessible natural wonders on the planet.