Measured by long-term average annual rainfall, the rainiest inhabited places in the world are López de Micay in Colombia (a reported, disputed average of about 12,892 mm a year), Lloró, also in Colombia (12,717 mm, 1952–1989) and Mawsynram in India (11,872 mm), which Guinness World Records lists as the official wettest place on Earth. All three are small towns. Among cities of more than 100,000 people, the wettest is Quibdó, capital of Colombia's Chocó department, with about 8,157 mm a year in the station normals of Colombia's weather service, IDEAM. Monrovia in Liberia, at roughly 4,600 mm, is the wettest large capital city.
What a Rainfall Ranking Actually Measures
"Rainiest" here means total precipitation in an average year, measured in millimetres at a single rain gauge. One millimetre is one litre of water falling on each square metre. To smooth out freak years, meteorologists average 30 years of readings into a "climate normal", such as 1981–2010 or 1991–2020. Rankings of the wettest places compare these averages, not single record years.
That definition leaves plenty of room for disagreement. A town's figure depends on where its gauge stands: Lloró's 12,717 mm comes from an agricultural farm east of the town, run by a university in Bogotá, while the town itself gets closer to 8,000 mm. The period matters too. Hilo in Hawaii averaged 3,220 mm at its airport over 1981–2010 but 3,060 mm over 1991–2020, and its wettest single year, 1994, brought 4,643 mm. A ranking can also look very different depending on whether it counts every inhabited place or only cities over a set population.
This article uses the long-term averages quoted in each place's climate records: IDEAM station normals and reported farm-station figures for Colombia, Guinness and long-term station averages for Meghalaya, and station averages for West Africa and Micronesia. It counts only inhabited settlements, which leaves out uninhabited mountaintops such as Big Bog on Maui (about 10,300 mm) and Mount Waiʻaleʻale on Kauaʻi (about 9,500 mm).
Mawsynram, Lloró and López de Micay: Three Claims to First Place
For most of the 20th century the title belonged to Cherrapunji, now officially called Sohra, in India's Meghalaya state. It still holds the Guinness records for the most rain in a year, 26,471 mm between August 1860 and July 1861, and in a month, 9,300 mm in July 1861. Its long-term average, about 11,777 mm, has since been edged out by Mawsynram, 15 km to the west in the same Khasi Hills, which averages 11,872 mm. Mawsynram lies in the East Khasi Hills district, 69 km from the state capital Shillong, and its height keeps it cool: average monthly temperatures run from about 11 °C in January to just above 20 °C in August.
Colombia's figures are higher but less settled. López de Micay, a Pacific coast municipality in Cauca department, has a reported average of 12,892 mm, though IDEAM's published station normals give about 12,169 mm. Lloró in Chocó reported 12,717 mm over 1952–1989. Tutunendo, a village 14 km from Quibdó, is usually credited with about 11,394 mm a year (IDEAM's 1991–2020 normals give a lower 10,486 mm), and in 1974 it received 26,303 mm, Colombia's wettest year on record. Guinness still lists Mawsynram as the record holder, but on the published averages two Colombian towns come out ahead.
Record Years and Record Days, 1860 to 2022
Averages decide the ranking, but the single-year and single-day records show how extreme these places can be.
- Wettest twelve months: Cherrapunji, 26,471 mm from August 1860 to July 1861, still the Guinness record more than 160 years later.
- Wettest calendar month: Cherrapunji again, 9,300 mm in July 1861.
- Wettest year in Colombia: Tutunendo, 26,303 mm in 1974.
- Mawsynram's big year: about 26,000 mm in 1985, according to Guinness.
- Wettest day at Mawsynram: 1,003.2 mm on 17 June 2022, beating 944.7 mm on 7 June 1966.
- Mountain extremes: 17,340 mm on Mount Waiʻaleʻale, Kauaʻi, in 1982, and more than 12,200 mm on Mount Bellenden Ker, Australia's wettest spot, in 2000.
- Single storm: 6,433 mm at Commerson on Réunion during Cyclone Hyacinthe in January 1980.
None of these one-off totals changes the ranking, because a single cyclone or an unusually strong monsoon can double a normal year. They do explain why rival lists disagree: a source that quotes a record year rather than an average can put almost any of the top six in first place.
The Ten Wettest Inhabited Places, by Average Annual Rainfall
Ranked by the long-term averages above, the ten wettest inhabited places come from just five countries, and Colombia supplies half of them.
| Rank | Place | Country | Average rainfall (mm/year) | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | López de Micay | Colombia | 12,892 | Reported average (disputed) |
| 2 | Lloró | Colombia | 12,717 | Farm station, 1952–1989 |
| 3 | Mawsynram | India | 11,872 | Guinness World Records |
| 4 | Sohra (Cherrapunji) | India | 11,777 | Long-term average |
| 5 | Tutunendo | Colombia | 11,394 | Long-term estimate |
| 6 | Debundscha | Cameroon | 10,299 | Long-term average |
| 7 | Quibdó | Colombia | 8,157 | IDEAM station normals |
| 8 | Buenaventura | Colombia | 6,898 | IDEAM station normals |
| 9 | Palikir | Micronesia | 5,202 | Station average |
| 10 | Monrovia | Liberia | 4,600 | Station average |
Why the Khasi Hills, the Chocó and Mount Cameroon Get So Much Rain
Every place in the top six owes its rain to the same mechanism: moist air forced uphill. In Meghalaya, the summer monsoon draws warm, saturated air north from the Bay of Bengal across the flat plains of Bangladesh. The east–west line of the Khasi Hills stands directly in its path, so the air is funnelled into a narrow zone and pushed up the steep southern escarpment, where it cools and condenses. Deep valleys channel the low clouds up the slopes, and the rapid climb speeds condensation. Most of the rain falls in the monsoon months; from December to February Mawsynram gets less than 30 mm a month.
Colombia's Chocó works on a different timetable. The Andes to the east block westerly winds driven by the Intertropical Convergence Zone, so unstable, rising air is forced up over the Chocó plain throughout the year, and a low-level wind current called the Chocó jet carries Pacific moisture inland. There is no real dry season. Tutunendo's rain is spread nearly evenly through the year, unlike Meghalaya's single monsoon burst.
Debundscha, a village on the coast of Cameroon, shows the effect on the smallest scale. It sits at the foot of the ocean-facing southwestern slope of Mount Cameroon, which rises to about 4,095 m within a short distance of the Atlantic, and it averages about 10,299 mm. Many of the wettest places in the world sit on similar steep windward slopes; the monsoon and the trade winds simply deliver the moisture.
Quibdó, Monrovia and Palikir: The Wettest Cities and Capitals
No place large enough to be called a city gets more rain than Quibdó. The municipality has about 129,000 people, mostly Afro-Colombian, on the banks of the Atrato River, and it records rain on about 309 days, or 84% of the year. It also gets only about 1,276 hours of sunshine annually, which puts it among the cloudiest cities in the world; even July, its sunniest month, averages about 135 hours. Buenaventura, Colombia's main Pacific port with 235,064 people at the 2018 census, receives 6,000 to 7,000 mm, making it the wettest city of more than 200,000 people in this list. Most of its built-up area stands on Cascajal Island, about 116 km by road from Cali, the regional capital.
The title of wettest capital city is claimed twice. Palikir, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia on the island of Pohnpei, averages about 5,202 mm a year, but it is a town of just over 5,000 people. Pohnpei is the largest, highest and wettest island in the federation, and Palikir gets heavy rain in every month of the year. Monrovia, founded in 1822 and home to 1,761,032 people at Liberia's 2022 census, averages about 4,600 mm. Most of that falls between May and October, and June and September each average more than 800 mm. Freetown in Sierra Leone, with about 4,400 mm, and Conakry in Guinea, with about 3,800 mm, show how wet the whole Upper Guinea coast is.
Sohra's Water Shortage: Where Total Rainfall Misleads
A yearly total says nothing about how the rain is spread out or whether the land can hold it. Sohra is the clearest example. Despite more than 11 m of rain a year, its people face serious water shortages in the dry winter, sometimes walking long distances for drinking water, because the rain runs straight off steep, deforested slopes and washes away the topsoil. The vegetation on the plateau is even partly adapted to drought. Rainwater harvesting has eased the problem in recent years.
The opposite pattern appears in Quibdó and Tutunendo, where steady daily downpours keep rivers high all year and support some of the most species-rich rainforest on Earth. Hilo, the largest settlement in Hawaii outside Oʻahu, sits on the windward side of its island and still ranks only fourth among US cities, behind Whittier, Ketchikan and Yakutat in Alaska, nowhere near this top ten. To see how these local extremes compare with whole-country totals, see the wettest countries in the world.