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Iguazu Falls
A vast chain of hundreds of waterfalls on the Argentina-Brazil border
Iguazu is not a single waterfall but a sweeping arc of them, up to 275 separate cascades strung along nearly three kilometres of the Iguazu River where it tumbles off a basalt plateau on the border of Argentina and Brazil. The individual drops range from about 60 to 82 metres, and the effect of the whole is overwhelming: a horseshoe of thundering water, drifting mist, and constant rainbows that dwarfs visitors lining the walkways. Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have seen it and exclaimed, poor Niagara.
At the heart of the system is the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's Throat, a U-shaped chasm where half the river's flow converges into a single roaring abyss, the spray rising so thickly that the bottom is rarely visible. The falls formed where the river crosses the edge of a great lava flow, and they are split into countless threads by rocky, forested islands along the rim. Surrounding the falls is a subtropical rainforest alive with toucans, coatis, jaguars, and clouds of butterflies, protected within national parks on both sides of the border.
The Guarani people lived along the river long before the Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca became the first European to record the falls in 1542. Their name comes from the Guarani words for big water. The two national parks that meet at the falls, on the Argentine and Brazilian sides, are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the falls have become one of South America's premier attractions, reached by trails and catwalks that bring visitors to the very lip of the Devil's Throat.