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Victoria Falls
The largest sheet of falling water on Earth, where the Zambezi plunges into a chasm
On the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Zambezi River reaches a sudden chasm and pours over a precipice more than 1,700 metres wide and over 100 metres deep, forming the largest single sheet of falling water in the world. The local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders, captures it perfectly: the spray rises in a column visible from kilometres away, and the roar of the falls carries far across the bush. In flood, the curtain of water is almost unbroken across its entire width.
Victoria Falls plunges into a narrow zigzag gorge carved over millennia as the Zambezi cut down through the flat basalt plateau along lines of fracture. The falls are flanked by a lush rainforest watered solely by their perpetual spray, an island of green in the surrounding savanna. The volume varies dramatically with the seasons: at peak flow in the wet season the spray can obscure the falls entirely, while in the dry season the curtain thins and bare rock shows through, revealing the structure of the gorge.
The Kololo and other peoples knew the falls long before the Scottish missionary David Livingstone reached them in 1855 and named them for Queen Victoria. The site became a cornerstone of southern African tourism, spanned by a railway bridge built in 1905 as part of a grand colonial vision. Today the falls, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, draw visitors to raft the Zambezi, peer over the brink at Devil's Pool, and stand in the drenching spray of one of the seven natural wonders of the world.