The tallest waterfall in South America is Angel Falls (Kerepakupai Merú) in Venezuela, which drops about 979 m in total, including an unbroken plunge of about 807 m, making it the tallest waterfall in the world. Next come three tiered falls in Peru, Las Tres Hermanas (about 914 m, poorly surveyed), Yumbilla (about 896 m) and Gocta (about 771 m), then Venezuela's Kukenán Falls (about 674 m).
Below those four, the heights drop sharply. Brazil's Cachoeira da Fumaça falls roughly 340 m in the Chapada Diamantina, Guyana's Kaieteur Falls makes a single 226 m drop with far more water than any of the taller falls, and Iguazú Falls on the Argentina–Brazil border, the continent's best-known waterfall, is only about 80 m high at its tallest point. Its fame comes from width and volume, not height.
Two regions account for almost every entry near the top: the tabletop mountains of south-eastern Venezuela and the cloud-forested eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes. Heights vary between sources. The World Waterfall Database, national geographic institutes and early expedition reports often disagree by tens of metres, so the figures below are the most commonly cited values, not exact measurements.
Sandstone Walls Nearly Two Billion Years Old
The reason Venezuela holds the continental record lies in the rock. South-eastern Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and northern Brazil sit on the Guiana Shield, one of the oldest pieces of continental crust in the Americas. Across it lie the sandstones and quartzites of the Roraima Group, laid down by rivers and shallow seas roughly 1.7 to 1.8 billion years ago. Over hundreds of millions of years erosion stripped most of that sandstone blanket away, leaving isolated flat-topped blocks called tepuis, a Pemón word usually translated as "house of the gods".
Three properties of that rock produce giant waterfalls. The sandstone is hard and resists erosion, so tepui cliffs stay vertical instead of slumping into slopes. It is cut by deep vertical joints, so when rock breaks off it falls away in slabs and keeps the walls sheer. And tepui summits catch enormous rainfall from Atlantic trade winds, feeding streams that have nowhere to go but over the edge. Auyán-tepui, the source of Angel Falls, has a summit plateau of about 700 km². Its runoff collects in the Kerepakupai (Churún) River and leaves the plateau through a single notch in the northern wall.
Guyana's Kaieteur Falls pours over a cap of the same Roraima-type sandstone and conglomerate. The Peruvian and Brazilian falls further down the list come from different geology altogether. You can see the tepui landscape at its most dramatic in our guide to Mount Roraima, which rises beside Kukenán on the Venezuela–Brazil–Guyana border.
Ranked: South America's Highest Waterfalls
| Rank | Waterfall | Country | Total height (approx.) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Angel Falls (Kerepakupai Merú) | Venezuela | 979 m | 807 m uninterrupted plunge |
| 2 | Las Tres Hermanas | Peru | c. 914 m | Tiered; remote, rarely surveyed |
| 3 | Yumbilla | Peru | c. 896 m | Four tiers; figure disputed |
| 4 | Gocta | Peru | c. 771 m | Two tiers |
| 5 | Kukenán (Cuquenán) | Venezuela | c. 674 m | Single tepui plunge |
| 6 | Cachoeira da Fumaça | Brazil | c. 340 m | Largely turns to mist |
| 7 | Cachoeira do Tabuleiro | Brazil | c. 273 m | Highest in Minas Gerais |
| 8 | Kaieteur | Guyana | 226 m | Single drop, high volume |
| 9 | Salto del Tequendama | Colombia | c. 132–157 m | Bogotá River |
| 10 | Cascata do Caracol | Brazil | c. 131 m | Basalt escarpment |
Tiered falls rank higher when every step is added together, which is why several Peruvian falls outscore Kukenán's single leap. Some lists count only the largest uninterrupted drop, and on that basis Angel Falls leads by an even wider margin. In Africa, South Africa's Tugela Falls (commonly given as 948 m in five tiers) is the usual rival for second place in the world.
The Best-Documented Giants, From the Top Down
Angel Falls, Venezuela: about 979 m
The falls carry the name of Jimmie Angel, an American bush pilot who flew over them in 1933 while searching for gold. On 9 October 1937 he landed his Flamingo monoplane on the summit of Auyán-tepui. The wheels sank into the bog, and Angel, his wife Marie and two companions spent 11 days walking down off the plateau. The aircraft stayed on the summit until the Venezuelan air force lifted it off in 1970; restored, it now stands outside the airport at Ciudad Bolívar. The first survey of the height came from a 1949 expedition led by the American photojournalist Ruth Robertson, whose results, reported in National Geographic, established the fall as the world's tallest. The falls lie inside Canaima National Park, about 30,000 km² and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994. Our Angel Falls guide covers the river trip from Canaima village to the base.
Yumbilla, Peru: about 896 m
Yumbilla drops in four tiers from a forested ridge near the village of Cuispes in the Amazonas region. Peru's Instituto Geográfico Nacional gave a figure of about 896 m in 2007, which would place it above Gocta, but the falls are hard to see whole and other surveys give lower totals. Treat its rank as provisional.
Gocta, Peru: about 771 m
Local people in the Chachapoyas area always knew about Gocta. The wider world did not until the German economist Stefan Ziemendorff saw it in 2005 and returned in 2006 with a Peruvian government team to measure it, a finding that made international headlines. The usual figures give an upper tier of about 231 m and a lower tier of about 540 m, though heights published since then vary. A two-to-three-hour trail now runs from the village of Cocachimba.
Kukenán, Venezuela: about 674 m
Kukenán Falls pours off the sheer wall of Kukenán-tepui, the table mountain beside Roraima. It is less visited than Angel Falls but visible to every trekker on the Roraima route through the Gran Sabana. In the dry months it can shrink to a thin ribbon.
The Andean Falls: Tiers on the Cloud-Forest Slopes
Peru's giants are not tepui falls. They sit on the eastern flank of the Andes, the zone Peruvians call the ceja de selva or "eyebrow of the jungle", where rivers fall from the high ranges toward the Amazon basin. Uplift of the Andes over the last 10 million years or so has steepened these slopes faster than streams can grade them, so water drops over ledges of limestone and sandstone in a series of steps. That explains why Andean falls are so often tiered and why new ones keep turning up. Las Tres Hermanas ("The Three Sisters") in Otishi National Park, Junín, is listed at around 914 m by the World Waterfall Database, but it is so remote that few people have seen it from the ground, and its figure rests mostly on aerial and map-based estimates.
Further north the Andean falls are shorter but historically important. Colombia's Salto del Tequendama, where the Bogotá River leaves the savanna, drops roughly 132 to 157 m depending on the source, and the mansion above it, built in the 1920s and later a hotel, now houses a museum. Ecuador lost its largest waterfall, the roughly 150 m San Rafael Falls on the Coca River, in February 2020, when the riverbed collapsed and the water began flowing through a sinkhole upstream. Engineers and geologists still disagree about whether the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam upstream played a part.
Brazil's Plateau Falls, From Quartzite to Basalt
Brazil has no tepuis on the scale of Venezuela's, but two of its old plateaus produce tall falls. In Bahia, the Chapada Diamantina is built of Precambrian quartzites and sandstones, and Cachoeira da Fumaça ("Smoke Falls") drops about 340 m from its edge. Some sources give up to 380 m. In the dry season the stream is so thin that the wind breaks it into spray before it reaches the bottom, and gusts can push the water back upwards. In Minas Gerais, Cachoeira do Tabuleiro drops about 273 m off the Serra do Espinhaço near Conceição do Mato Dentro.
Further south the rock changes. About 130 million years ago, as South America began to separate from Africa, enormous basalt eruptions covered the Paraná basin in layered lava flows. Cascata do Caracol, about 131 m high in the state park of the same name near Canela, Rio Grande do Sul, falls over the edge of those basalt layers. Iguazú Falls, several hundred kilometres to the north-west, is cut into the same sequence.
Angel Falls, Kaieteur and Iguazú: Height Versus Volume
"Tallest" and "biggest" are different rankings, and South America has the clearest example of each. Angel Falls is the tallest, but the Kerepakupai River is small. Much of its water breaks up into mist on the way down, and between about December and April the flow can shrink to a trickle. Iguazú is the opposite: roughly 2.7 km of rim broken into somewhere between 150 and 300 separate cascades depending on the river level, with the U-shaped Devil's Throat (Garganta del Diablo) dropping about 80 m. Average flow is commonly given at around 1,500 to 1,750 m³ per second, and both the Argentine (1984) and Brazilian (1986) national parks around it are UNESCO sites.
Kaieteur sits between the two. On the Potaro River in central Guyana, it drops 226 m in a single sheer plunge, about four times the height of Niagara, with an average flow often cited at roughly 660 m³ per second. That combination of height and volume makes it one of the most powerful single-drop waterfalls on Earth. It was first recorded by the British geologist Charles Barrington Brown in 1870, and Kaieteur National Park was created around it in 1929. More detail is in our Kaieteur Falls profile.
So Angel Falls wins on height, Iguazú on width and total flow, and Kaieteur on the balance of both. If the power of falling water interests you more than height, Iguazú and Kaieteur also appear in our ranking of the most powerful waterfalls in the world.