Two billion years of sandstone, and the tallest waterfall on earth
Venezuela
Venezuela holds the oldest exposed rock on the continent and the tallest waterfall on earth, and almost nobody goes. The tepuis of the Guiana Shield are sandstone tabletops rising two thousand metres straight out of savanna, cut off from the ground below for long enough that a third of the plants on some summits grow nowhere else. Angel Falls drops 979 metres off the side of one of them, 807 of those in a single uninterrupted plunge, which makes it the tallest in the world by a margin of more than four hundred metres. Mount Roraima is a six-day walk from the Pemón village of Paraitepui, and the only way up that does not need ropes is a ledge running diagonally across a cliff face. Conan Doyle set The Lost World there in 1912 without ever seeing it.
Small-group expeditions
3 tours · from $2,775 per person
View all Venezuela toursPrivate, on your dates, built around what you want to see. We plan it with the operators and guides we travel with ourselves.
Kerepakupai Merú falls 979 metres off Auyán-tepui, 807 of them in one uninterrupted drop. Reaching the base means a curiara up the Carrao and Churún rivers, possible only when there is enough water in them, then a walk to the Mirador Laime and a night in hammocks facing the falls. Jimmie Angel put his plane down on the summit in 1937 and it stayed there for thirty-three years.
The trek starts at Paraitepui and takes six days, and a Pemón guide is not optional. The only non-technical way up is La Rampa, a ledge running diagonally across a cliff face that looks impossible from below. The summit is 2,810 metres of black rock, quartz fields, carnivorous pitcher plants found nowhere else, and a marker where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet.
Where the Catatumbo river runs into Lake Maracaibo the sky lights up almost every night of the year. Guinness has it as the most lightning-struck place on earth, roughly 250 strikes per square kilometre annually, on as many as three hundred nights, in displays that can carry on for nine hours. Sailors once used it to navigate and called it the Maracaibo Beacon. You watch from a hammock in a palafito, a village built on stilts over the water, reached by boat through flooded forest. July to November, and October is the strongest.
Twenty-five thousand square kilometres of channels where the Orinoco breaks up before the sea, and the homeland of the Warao, whose name means boat people and who build on stilts above the water. The delta runs with Warao guides out of Warao communities.
Between December and April the floodwater goes and everything that lives in the Llanos comes for whatever water is left. Capybara in the hundreds, spectacled caiman lining the banks, scarlet ibis coming in to roost in numbers that turn trees red. Guides at the hatos find green anaconda by wading and feeling for them with their feet.
Explore destinations
Flora and fauna
4 species
We use cookies to understand how travelers use our site and to improve it. You choose what is allowed. Read our cookie policy
Keeps the site secure and working, and remembers this choice. Always on.
Google Analytics, so we can see which journeys people look for and what is hard to find.
The Meta pixel, so we can tell whether our advertising reaches the right travelers.
For visitors in California and other US states with the same right. Turning this on also turns marketing off.
