Angel Falls and the lost world — earth's highest waterfall above the tepui plateaus
Canaima National Park is one of the great wilderness destinations on earth — a vast Gran Sabana plateau studded with ancient tabletop mountains (tepuis) that rise sheer from the jungle. The park contains Angel Falls (Kerepakupai Merú), the world's highest uninterrupted waterfall at 979m — nearly 20 times the height of Niagara. The tepuis themselves, billions of years old and biologically isolated for millennia, are Conan Doyle's 'Lost World' made real: many species found nowhere else. Access is almost entirely by small aircraft to the Canaima lagoon, followed by motorized canoe through jungle…
The tepuis (from Pemón: 'house of the gods') of the Gran Sabana are among the world's oldest geological formations — Precambrian sandstone plateaus over two billion years old, formed before complex life existed. Angel Falls was first documented by a Western explorer in 1933, when American aviator Jimmie Angel flew over it and reported the falls; he crash-landed his plane on the summit of Auyantepui in 1937 trying to return (the plane remained there for 33 years). The falls were named in his honour, though the Pemón indigenous people knew them as Kerepakupai Merú (waterfall of the deepest plac…