Bolívar, Venezuela · UNESCO World Heritage
Canaima National Park
Three million hectares of table-top mountains, black rivers and grassland older than almost anything else on the continent. This is where our expeditions take place.
Three million hectares of table-top mountains, black rivers and grassland older than almost anything else on the continent. This is where our expeditions take place.
Canaima is one of the largest national parks on Earth, roughly the size of Belgium, set in the southeast of Venezuela where the country meets Brazil and Guyana. It was established in 1962 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 on all four natural criteria.
The Pemón have lived in this land for centuries, and the tepuis sit at the center of how they understand the world. The outside world came late. In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle set The Lost World on a plateau modeled on Mount Roraima, after explorers brought back word of mountains with untouched summits. In 1933 the American aviator Jimmie Angel flew over a wall of Auyán-tepui and saw a waterfall falling nearly a kilometer, which is how the tallest waterfall on the planet came to carry his name in English. A 1949 expedition led by journalist Ruth Robertson, backed by National Geographic, made the survey that fixed its accepted height. Venezuela established the park in 1962 and expanded it to its present size in 1975.
About two thirds of the park is tepui: sheer-walled sandstone plateaus that rise straight out of the forest. Their rock belongs to the Roraima Supergroup, sand laid down more than 1.5 billion years ago over a granite basement approaching three billion years in age, from a time when South America and Africa were still one landmass. Wind and water have since stripped away everything softer, leaving the plateaus standing alone with vertical walls that can exceed a thousand meters. They are among the oldest exposed rock formations anywhere on the planet.
Off the wall of Auyán-tepui pours Angel Falls, known to the Pemón as Kerepakupai Merú, roughly "waterfall of the deepest place." It drops 979 metres in total, with an uninterrupted free fall of 807 metres. In the wet season the water meets so much air on the way down that it arrives at the base as mist. It is the single most recognised sight in the park, and only a small part of it.
Each tepui summit has stood apart for so long that life on top evolved on its own. The result is extreme endemism: more than three hundred plant species here grow nowhere else, including carnivorous marsh pitcher plants of the genus Heliamphora that trap insects to survive the poor summit soil. Below the walls the forest and the savanna hold jaguar, giant otter, harpy eagle and brilliantly colored poison dart frogs. Biologists treat the tepuis as one of the most distinct biogeographical regions on Earth.
The park is the homeland of the Pemón, an Indigenous people of the Carib language family, made up of the Kamarakoto, Arekuna and Taurepán groups. They read the tepuis as the home of spirits called mawari, and their knowledge of the terrain is what makes travel here possible at all. Today many Pemón communities run the camps and guiding that carry visitors into the park. Our expeditions operate in partnership with them, and a share of every trip supports Escuela Vertical, the foundation that certifies Pemón mountain guides.
The scenery is stable, but the living park is not. The IUCN rates its conservation outlook as one of significant concern. The gravest threat is illegal gold mining, which uses mercury along the rivers. By 2022 direct mining damage covered roughly 1,540 hectares, more than eight times the area affected in 2000, and it keeps expanding. Wildfires are worsening, with tens of thousands of hectares burned in a single 2024 season. Rising foot traffic on the most famous summits brings introduced plants, waste and pathogens to ground that was untouched. A staff of only about fifty rangers covers three million hectares, and most of the western park, including Angel Falls, still lacks a full management plan.
The lawful economy of Canaima is built on tourism. In its stronger years the park drew close to a hundred thousand visitors, a number that has fallen sharply with the country's wider situation, to roughly twenty thousand in recent counts. That trade is largely in Pemón hands: the lagoon camps, the boats up the Carrao and Churún rivers, the flights and the guiding. Against it runs the shadow economy of gold, which pays quickly and costs the park dearly. The park's long-term health depends on tourism that is worth more to the people who live here than mining is.
Everything on this page is checked against public, reputable sources. Open the list below to read further.
