Venezuela's Orinoco gateway — Autana tepui, Yanomami territory, and Humboldt's natural canal
Puerto Ayacucho is the capital of Amazonas State in southern Venezuela — a frontier town on the Orinoco River at the point where the river becomes unnavigable due to the Maipures and Atures rapids. The town is the logistical base for expeditions into Venezuela's extraordinarily biodiverse Amazonian south — the Autana tepui (a sheer-sided 1,300m sandstone monolith with a cave tunnel through its summit) to the south, the Gran Sabana and Angel Falls to the east, and the Yanomami indigenous territories along the Brazil border. The Orinoco here retains an extraordinary character — Alexander von Hu…
Puerto Ayacucho was founded in 1924 as a river port to bypass the Atures and Maipures rapids — the point where the Orinoco becomes unnavigable for 80km. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland passed through this stretch of the Orinoco in 1800 and documented the Casiquiare canal — the world's only natural waterway connecting two major river systems — providing scientific evidence that had been doubted in Europe. Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America gives the most vivid early account of this reach of the Orinoco. The Yanomami people — whose territory…