56 Fun Facts About Angel Falls

The camp where trips to Angel Falls begin can be reached only how?

By air. No road crosses the jungle to the lagoon-side camp, so visitors fly in on small planes and then head upriver by canoe.

Angel Falls is about as tall as three of which landmark?

Eiffel Tower. Three of them would reach 990 metres against the falls' official 979, a figure a 1949 expedition surveyed after trekking to the foot of the drop.

Angel Falls' 807-metre plunge is almost as tall as which skyscraper?

Burj Khalifa. Dubai's 828-metre tower would only just top the plunge, a drop so long that much of the water has turned to mist by the time it lands.

Angel Falls lies inside which Venezuelan national park?

Canaima. The rivers that rise in the park feed the Guri Dam downstream, which generates a large share of Venezuela's electricity.

Which Venezuelan state contains Angel Falls?

Bolívar. Its capital, Ciudad Bolívar, was called Angostura until 1846, and it is the town where Angostura bitters were invented in 1824.

Jimmie Angel, the pilot who gave Angel Falls its name, came from which country?

United States. Born in Missouri in 1899, he took up barnstorming with his brothers and by the 1920s was flying south of the border for a living.

What was Jimmie Angel searching for when he first flew over the falls?

A valuable ore bed. He was guiding a mining company's expedition, and he spent the rest of his life hunting a 'river of gold' he claimed to have landed beside years before.

What went wrong when Angel tried to land on the tepui in 1937?

The wheels sank into marshy ground. The touchdown looked perfect until the plane broke through the sod and stopped dead with its nose buried in the mud.

What was the name of the Flamingo monoplane Angel left stranded on the tepui in 1937?

El Río Caroní. After 33 years on the summit the plane was taken down, rebuilt and set on the grass in front of a city airport terminal.

Who lifted Angel's stranded plane off the tepui in 1970?

Venezuela's air force. Its helicopters brought the plane down in pieces, and it was restored at the air force's aviation museum in Maracay.

Unverified legends have Jimmie Angel working as an aviation scout for which famous British officer?

Lawrence of Arabia. Other tales made Angel a First World War ace and the founder of a Chinese warlord's air force; his family's researchers could verify none of them.

After Jimmie Angel died in 1956, what did his family do at the falls in 1960?

Scattered his ashes there. His widow Marie and their two sons took the remains from an aviators' shrine and released them over the falls, as he had asked.

Scientists have long called the tepuis by the title of which adventure novel?

The Lost World. Conan Doyle's 1912 adventure put living dinosaurs on a cliff-walled South American plateau, and the name stuck to the real tablelands.

The thin, nutrient-poor soils on tepui summits have favoured which unusual kind of plant?

Carnivorous plants. With so little nourishment in the rock, pitcher plants, sundews and bladderworts trap insects instead, and many of them grow nowhere else.

What at Angel Falls is named after Aleksandrs Laime, the Latvian explorer who cut the first trail to its foot?

The main viewpoint. Mirador Laime is the outcrop facing the falls where visitors stop to photograph them; Laime walked to the foot by himself in the 1940s, then guided the party that measured the drop.

Which museum sent an expedition up Auyán-tepui within months of Angel's 1937 landing there?

American Museum of Natural History. Funded by a Caracas businessman and birdwatcher, its team spent three months on the tepui collecting its birds, reptiles and flora.

Ruth Robertson's account of her 1949 expedition to Angel Falls ran in which magazine?

National Geographic. Four earlier overland attempts had failed; her party reached the foot of the falls on 12 May 1949 and brought back the first measurement of its height.

Angel Falls' Spanish name, Salto Ángel, became official in 1939 by appearing where?

On a government map. A presidential decree had ordered the little-known region surveyed, and the map in the 1939 report was the first to print the name.

A four-man team first did what at Angel Falls in 1971?

Climbed the face. Led by Pittsburgh engineer George Bogel, the four spent about ten days on the wall, and one of them, Englishman David Nott, wrote it up as Angels Four.

Angel Falls is the best-known landmark of which South American highland region?

The Guiana Highlands. Rain falls there in nearly every season, and it runs off tabletop mountains capped with rock hard enough to keep a sheer edge.

An anteater, an armadillo and an otter found in the park around Angel Falls all share which word in their names?

Giant. All three are listed as threatened species, the giant otter after decades of hunting for its fur.

Which BBC nature series filmed Angel Falls from a helicopter for its 'Fresh Water' episode?

Planet Earth. The 2006 episode follows fresh water from the daily downpours on the tepuis to the sea, pausing to show the whole height of the falls from the air.

Botanists have recorded an estimated 500 species of which flower in the park around Angel Falls?

Orchids. One orchid hunter who combed Auyán-tepui in the 1960s published his findings under the title 'home of fifty million orchids'.

Paradise Falls in which Pixar film was inspired mainly by Angel Falls?

Up. To get the look right, director Pete Docter and a team of Pixar artists travelled to Venezuela's tepuis and climbed one to sketch and paint the scenery.

Which tepui did Pete Docter's Pixar team climb on their research trip to Venezuela?

Mount Roraima. Unlike its sheer-sided neighbours it has a natural ramp to the summit, which makes it the easiest of the tepuis to climb.

Which 2015 action remake shows characters free-climbing beside Angel Falls?

Point Break. The scene was filmed on the real cliffs beside the falls, with the crew ferrying its equipment up the river by canoe.

Which Robin Williams film shot some of its scenes at Angel Falls?

What Dreams May Come. The 1998 afterlife fantasy was shot mostly in California and Montana, with a short trip to Venezuela for the falls, and it won the Oscar for visual effects.

Which 1990 creature feature shows scientists flying past Angel Falls?

Arachnophobia. Its scientists fly past the falls to collect specimens, and the Californian town where the deadly spider ends up is jokingly named after the national park.

What did Jimmie Angel leave in his stranded plane before abandoning it on the tepui in 1937?

A written note. It explained the landing and the party's departure, in case the search planes they were expecting found the aircraft first.

What did Hugo Chávez announce he intended to do about the falls in 2009?

Restore an indigenous name. 'This is ours, long before Angel ever arrived there,' he told viewers of his weekly television show, though he later said he would not decree the change.

The indigenous name Kerepakupai Merú is said to mean what?

Waterfall of the deepest place. That is the usual translation, but elders living beside the mountain have said their own name for the falls is Churún-Vená.

Auyán-tepui, the mountain Angel Falls drops from, is often called what in English?

Devil's Mountain. Writers have enjoyed the irony ever since: Newsweek headed its 1949 report on the first expedition to the foot of the falls 'Angel on Devil's Mountain'.

Which indigenous people live in the national park around Angel Falls?

Pemon. Their villages lie scattered along the park's rivers, and Pemon guides take visitors upriver to the falls.

Which great river, not the Amazon, carries Angel Falls' water to the Atlantic?

Orinoco. The water first passes through the reservoir of the Guri Dam, then joins the Orinoco at Ciudad Guayana, a short way above its delta.

Much of the national park around Angel Falls is not jungle but which kind of landscape?

Rolling grassland. The thin, sandy soils of the Gran Sabana, the Great Savanna, carry grass on the high ground, with forest only in the hollows and along the rivers.

The national park around Angel Falls gained which status in 1994?

World Heritage Site. UNESCO's listing singles out the tepuis, as a geological and biological world of their own, and the cliffs and waterfalls that pour off them.

The national park containing Angel Falls is roughly the same size as which country?

Belgium. The park did not start out that big: a second sector to the east was added in 1975, thirteen years after the first was declared.

Which eagle, a hunter of sloths and monkeys, lives in the forests around Angel Falls?

Harpy eagle. It nests in the tallest rainforest trees and snatches its prey off the branches with talons as long as a grizzly bear's claws.

Tepuis such as Auyán-tepui are made mainly of which rock?

Sandstone. It has had so long to weather that water has carved caves and sinkholes into it of a kind normally found only in limestone.

South America, tepuis and all, was once joined to Africa in which southern supercontinent?

Gondwana. As early as about 1600, once good maps existed, scholars noticed that the coasts of West Africa and eastern South America fit together like puzzle pieces.

Because of their unique species, tepuis are often compared to which islands?

Galápagos. David Attenborough called the tepuis 'the Galapagos of the floral world': each summit is walled off by cliffs, and many of its plants grow nowhere else.

Which South African waterfall rivals Angel Falls for the title of the world's tallest?

Tugela Falls. Czech surveyors measured it at 983 metres in 2016, four more than Angel Falls' official figure, but it comes down in five separate drops.

Angel Falls is at least 15 times as high as which famous waterfall?

Niagara Falls. Angel Falls wins on height alone: a passenger on one of Jimmie Angel's flights likened it to 'an immense rope hanging over the canyon wall'.

Which Elizabethan explorer is dubiously claimed as the first European to see the falls?

Walter Raleigh. Hunting for El Dorado, he described a mountain that may have been a tepui, but historians call the idea that he saw the falls far-fetched.

By his own account, where did Jimmie Angel meet the stranger who first hired him to fly to Venezuela?

A bar in Panama. In Angel's telling the man, McCracken, paid him $5,000 for the flight; no document or witness has ever confirmed that the trip took place.

Why do boat trips to the foot of Angel Falls mostly stop early in the year?

Shallow rivers. Rainfall drops off from about December to March, so river trips mostly run from June to December, when the falls are also at their fullest.

How did Aleksandrs Laime, who cut the first trail to Angel Falls, spend his later years?

Alone on a river island nearby. Travel writers who called on him in the 1980s and 1990s described a hermit who had lived for decades on a small island on the river route to the falls.

What is the title of Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa's 1998 novel about Jimmie Angel?

Ícaro. The title is Spanish for Icarus, the flyer of Greek myth, and the novel insists the falls are named for Jimmie Angel the man, not for any angel.

From what does the water of Angel Falls emerge near the top of Auyán-tepui?

A cleft in the cliff. Rain that soaks into the summit drains through cracks in the rock, so the falls burst out just below the rim instead of pouring over it.

Seen from the air, Auyán-tepui's summit plateau is roughly what shape?

A heart. A vast canyon cuts into the plateau from the north, and it is into this canyon that the falls drop.

The lagoon and waterfalls at the camp near Angel Falls are stained golden-brown by what?

Tannins from plants. They leach out of decaying leaves along the banks, the same chemistry that colours a cup of tea, and stain the whole river system.

Many plants on the tepui cliffs are bromeliads, relatives of which familiar fruit?

Pineapple. Bromeliads are among the few plants hardy enough for the bare rock at the foot of the tepui cliffs, where they grow in great variety.

Besides Guyana, the park around Angel Falls reaches Venezuela's border with which country?

Brazil. Around 2000 Venezuela ran power lines across the park to carry electricity to Brazil, and local people who had not been consulted pulled some of them down.

What did local people fear on the tepuis, so that they never climbed them?

Spirits. They are known as mawari, and the summits were left alone until outside explorers began climbing them.

In the falls' Spanish name, Salto Ángel, what does the word 'salto' literally mean?

Leap. Spanish uses the same word for a jump and for a waterfall, and the Ángel is Jimmie Angel's surname, not a heavenly being.

Roughly how old is the rock that forms the tepuis?

1.8 billion years. A single slab of it once covered the whole region; cracking and erosion then wore most of it away and left only the hardest blocks standing.