Angel Falls

Angel Falls drops from the rim of Auyán-tepui, a sandstone massif of roughly 700 square kilometres whose cliffs fall vertically into the canyon of the Churún River. The rock belongs to the Roraima Supergroup and is close to two billion years old, part of the Guiana Shield. The tepuis are what remains of a sandstone sheet that once covered the region, and the sheer walls left behind by its erosion are what make a drop of this scale possible anywhere on earth. The figures in circulation, 979 metres of total descent with an uninterrupted plunge of 807 metres, come from a single survey carried out in May 1949 by an expedition led by the American photojournalist Ruth Robertson and backed by the National Geographic Society. They have never been independently re-measured. The total includes around 400 metres of cascade and rapids below the main plunge and a further short drop beyond that, which is why the number in the guidebooks is larger than the wall of water in the photographs.

Jimmie Angel was looking for a gold-bearing ore bed when he flew over the falls on 16 November 1933. He came back on 9 October 1937 and landed his Flamingo monoplane, El Río Caroní, on the summit of Auyán-tepui with his wife Marie and two companions. The ground was boggier than it looked from the air. The wheels sank, the aircraft nosed over, and the four of them walked out over eleven days to Kamarata. The plane stayed on the summit for thirty-three years until the Venezuelan Air Force lifted it off in sections in 1970; it was restored and now stands outside the airport terminal at Ciudad Bolívar. Angel died in 1956 and his ashes were scattered over the falls in 1960. A Latvian explorer, Aleksandrs Laime, had reached the base alone in 1946 and cut the trail through the forest that visitors still walk today, which is why the viewpoint carries his name.

The Pemón of the Kamarata and Canaima valleys belong to the Kamarakoto subgroup and have lived beneath Auyán-tepui for centuries. The mountain's name is usually translated as Devil's Mountain, and the Pemón historically kept off the summit, which they understood as the country of the mawari spirits. Their names for the falls are Kerepakupai Merú, the waterfall of the deepest place, and Parakupá Vená, the fall from the highest point. In December 2009 President Hugo Chávez argued on television that the international name should be dropped in favour of the Pemón one, then clarified within days that he would not decree the change, only defend the use of the indigenous name. No renaming took effect. Both names are in use, and in Canaima you will hear whichever one the person speaking prefers. Almost everyone who guides, pilots a boat or cooks on the river route is Pemón, and several of the camps are community owned.

The tepui summits function as biological islands, separated from the lowlands long enough for their plants and animals to diverge from everything around them. Across the region roughly a third to two fifths of vascular plant species are found nowhere else, including the carnivorous marsh pitchers of the genus Heliamphora, which compensate for nutrient-poor sandstone soil by trapping insects. Auyán-tepui has its own endemics. Heliamphora minor grows only here. So does the small toad Oreophrynella cryptica. A 2008 American Museum of Natural History survey of the summit recorded twenty-four amphibian and reptile species and described four of them as new to science, among them the treefrog now known as Boana angelica and the snake Atractus guerreroi. None of this is what a visitor sees. The river journey and the base camps belong to the lowland forest, where the reward is birds, the occasional troop of monkeys, caiman along the banks and, with luck and a quiet guide, rather more.