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Angel Falls is located in the Guayana highlands, one of five topographical regions of Venezuela ... it plunges off the edge of a table-top mountain, and free falls 2,421 feet to the river below, making it the tallest waterfalls on earth.
In total it is 15 times higher than Niagara Falls with a total of 2,937 feet.
In 1935, US aviator Jimmie Angel, flying over the area in search of gold, landed on the top of the lone Auyantepui mountain ... his plane got stuck in the boggy jungle on top of the mountain and he noticed a pretty impressive waterfall plunging thousands of feet down. He wasn't too happy about the 11-mile hike back to civilization, and his plane remained stuck, rusting on the mountain as a monument to his discovery but soon the whole world would know about the falls, which came to be known as Angel Falls, after the man who "discovered" them.
Angel Falls plunges from the top of a mesa, or what the natives call a Tepuyi ... one of over a hundred of its kind which are scattered about the Guiana Highlands of southeast Venezuela.
Like so many slumbering giants, what characterizes these mesas (Tepuys) is their massive heights soaring up towards the sky, each with a flat top and totally vertical sides. Also called "table mountains" (which accurately describes their shapes) these Tepuys were formed out of sandstone billions of years ago. Their vertical sides are continually being eroded by the action of water from the heavy rainfall the Guiana Highlands gets.
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