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Guiana Highlands
The land of tepuis, the table mountains of northern South America
The Guiana Highlands are an ancient upland spread across the north of South America, a region of rainforest, savanna, and - above all - tepuis, the sheer-walled table mountains that rise like islands from the surrounding lowlands. Covering a huge area across Venezuela, Guyana, Brazil, and neighbouring countries, the highlands hold some of the oldest rock on the planet and some of its most isolated ecosystems, where life on each flat summit has evolved in near-total separation from the world below.
The tepuis are the eroded remnants of a vast sandstone sheet laid down on one of Earth's oldest crustal blocks, the Guiana Shield, dating back nearly two billion years. Over immense spans of time, rivers and weather have stripped most of that layer away, leaving scattered mesas with vertical walls hundreds of metres high and flat, rain-lashed summits. Their isolation has produced extraordinary endemism, with many plants and animals found on a single tabletop and nowhere else. From the rim of one tepui, Auyantepui, the world's highest waterfall, Angel Falls, plunges nearly a kilometre.
Long the home of Indigenous peoples such as the Pemon, the highlands entered the wider imagination through Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, inspired by their cloud-wrapped plateaus. Mount Roraima, where the borders of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana meet, is the most famous of the tepuis. Much of the Venezuelan highlands lies within Canaima National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protecting a landscape that remains among the least-explored on the continent.