In the Pixar film ‘Up’, old man Carl teams up with a boy scout in a quest to move his wife’s clubhouse to Paradise Falls, a spectacular waterfall in Venezuela.
Venezuela’s Angel Falls is the real-life inspiration for the fictional paradise and with a drop of 807 meters high (2,648 feet), it just so happens to be the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world. In fact, the drop is so incredibly high that by the time the water reaches the canyon floor, it is no longer liquid but has evaporated into a column of mist.
Angel Falls does not lay claim to be the world’s largest waterfall. That honor goes to the Denmark Strait cataract, a 3.5-kilometer (2.2 mile) whopper located between Greenland and Iceland. It certainly earns its prize, standing more than three times as high as Angel Falls and churning out roughly 5 million cubic meters (175 million cubic feet) per second. However, it also just so happens to be very underwater – so not particularly convenient from a tourism point of view.
There seems to be some debate over whether Venezuela’s Angel Falls or South Africa’s Tugela Falls holds the title of the overall tallest waterfall in the world. However, according to the World Waterfall Database, that title would go to Tugela Falls in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, which is a staggering 948 meters (3,110 feet) tall. Unlike Angel Falls, Tugela Falls consists of a series of drops, the tallest being 411 meters (1,350 feet). This makes Angel Falls the tallest uninterrupted waterfall on the planet.
The falls are located in the jungles of eastern Venezuela’s Canaima National Park. According to EarthDate, a production of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas Austin, the average flow is a relatively paltry 14 cubic meters (500 cubic feet) per second – making the falls less of a torrent and more of a trickle in comparison to the Denmark Strait. To take another famous waterfall as a comparison, Niagra Falls boasts a much more impressive flow of 286 cubic meters (10,126) per second.
The angelic name derives from Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who found himself in a sticky spot after his plane was damaged during a landing on a tepui, Auyán-Tepuí (or Devil’s Mesa), in 1937. It is during this trip that Jimmie was said to have discovered the falls. While it is still commonly referred to as Angel Falls (or Salto Angel), the official name was changed to its indigenous name, Kerepakupai Merú, in 2011, Reuters reported at the time. Venezuela’s then president, Hugo Chavez, told audiences, “This is ours, long before Angel arrived there.”
While Angel Falls’s sheer scale makes it a natural wonder, the world is full of impressive waterfalls – including Blood Falls in East Antarctica, whose rust-colored hue has confused explorers for decades.
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