On the Guiana Plateau in South America, on the small river Churun, is the highest waterfall in the world. It is surrounded by the kingdom of high mountains, turbulent rivers flowing through deep gorges, and dense impenetrable forests - a wild and little-mastered corner of the globe.
The waterfall has a height of 1054 meters, other sources claim that it is slightly smaller - 979 meters. The highest waterfall has several names. The most famous is Angel, which means "angel", and it is named after the discoverer - Juan Angel. The Indians call him Churun-Meru or Apemei, which translates as a "girl's eyebrow."
Europeans Angel opened relatively recently. The fact that this is a miracle of nature - a kilometer-long vertical stream of water - is located in the most remote and inaccessible corner of our planet. The Churun River flows along the Auyan-Tepui Plateau (Devil's Mountain). Stacked by porous sandstones, this mountain range rises 2, 600 meters above the selva. The water of the river, abruptly breaking down from a steep rock wall into a dense tropical forest, forms the highest waterfall on Earth.
Waterfall Discoverer - Adventurer
The official opening took place at the beginning of the last century. At this time, there is an outbreak of diamond rush in Venezuela. Numerous adventurers rushed into an impenetrable selva. Juan Angel was one of them. On a small sports plane, in 1935 he flew to Auyang-Tepui, hoping to find diamonds there.
Angel could not discover diamond deposits, but he saw the highest waterfall and informed the whole world about its existence. His plane crashed, had to make an emergency landing in the same area that Conan Doyle described in his famous novel "The Lost World". Angel miraculously managed to get out of the impenetrable jungle, and, reaching the first settlement, he immediately announced the perfect discovery. Since then, his name has been written on all maps of the world, in the very place where the highest waterfall on our planet is located.
The lost world has become available to everyone
Only fourteen years after the famous flight of Angel, in 1949, a group of American and Venezuelan surveyors with great difficulty managed to break through to the waterfall. With the help of a machete and axes, they had to cut their way through a wild selva, completely entwined with vines. The last 36 km of the journey took 19 days. Their efforts were fully paid off when they saw firsthand the whole unforgettable beauty of the water column, plunging from a great height into a large lake at the foot of a plateau.
The terrain in the area of Devil’s Mountain is so impassable that for a very long time only the most brave explorers could break through to it. Nowadays, anyone can see the highest waterfall. Local authorities managed to organize tourist routes to it. To Angel you can fly in a small light helicopter or swim along the river in a canoe with a motor. Fans of extreme sensations are given the opportunity to fly a hang glider by jumping from the edge of a plateau and enjoy all the splendor of falling water from a bird's eye view.
