The Tables of the Gods
Two-billion-year-old sandstone plateaus standing a kilometre above the savanna, each summit isolated long enough to evolve its own flora, with the highest waterfall on earth dropping off one of them. And a country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world that has produced the largest displacement crisis in the Americas.
Auyán-tepui rises out of the Gran Sabana as a wall. Not a mountain in the sense of a slope you could walk up, but a plateau standing 1,000 metres above the savanna on vertical sandstone cliffs, its top flat and often invisible inside cloud. From a gap in that cliff face, water falls 979 metres — the highest uninterrupted waterfall on earth — and much of it turns to mist before reaching the bottom.
Angel Falls is the thing Venezuela is known for among people who know nothing else about Venezuela. It is also, right now, extremely difficult to reach, for reasons that have nothing to do with the terrain.
What a tepui is
The tepuis are among the oldest exposed rock formations on the planet. The Roraima sandstone was laid down roughly two billion years ago, when the Guiana Shield was part of a supercontinent, and the plateaus are what remains after the softer surrounding rock eroded away over an almost incomprehensible span of time.
There are somewhere over a hundred of them across the Venezuela–Guyana–Brazil border region, and the important consequence is biological. Each summit has been isolated from the others and from the lowlands for millions of years, at a different altitude and in a different microclimate, on nutrient-poor rock in high rainfall. The result is evolution in parallel: a high proportion of the plant species on any given tepui summit exist on that summit and nowhere else. Carnivorous plants are common, because the rock provides nothing and insects do.
Mount Roraima, at the triple border, is the accessible one — a six-day trek up a natural ramp on the Venezuelan side, across a summit landscape of black rock, quartz crystal fields, sinkholes and pools that looks like nowhere on earth. It is the tepui that gave Arthur Conan Doyle the idea for The Lost World in 1912, and the comparison is not entirely journalistic.
The word tepui is from Pemón, the language of the Indigenous people of the Gran Sabana, and means house of the gods. The Pemón traditionally did not climb them.
The country around them
Venezuela is a country of extraordinary physical variety that almost nobody currently sees. The Andes reach 4,978 metres at Pico Bolívar above Mérida, reached by what is among the longest and highest cable-car systems in the world. The Caribbean coast has islands — Los Roques is an archipelago of sandbars and turquoise flats that would be internationally famous under a different government. The Orinoco delta is a labyrinth of channels where Warao communities live in stilt houses. The llanos flood seasonally and hold capybara, anaconda and one of the densest concentrations of waterbirds in South America. Catatumbo, at the mouth of the lake at Maracaibo, produces lightning on more nights of the year than anywhere else on the planet.
And underneath it, the largest proven oil reserves in the world — larger than Saudi Arabia’s, though much of it is heavy crude in the Orinoco belt that is expensive to extract and refine.
The country with the largest oil reserves on earth is also the site of the largest displacement crisis in the hemisphere. Both facts belong in the same sentence.
How it unravelled
Venezuela was, for most of the twentieth century, the wealthiest country in South America. Oil built Caracas, funded a middle class, and drew immigration from Spain, Italy and Portugal after the Second World War.
The unravelling has been long and is argued about with enormous heat. The broad sequence: oil revenue dependence and a state that spent it rather than diversifying; the Caracazo riots of 1989 after austerity measures; Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998 on a platform of redistribution, funded through the 2000s by an extraordinary oil price boom that did fund real reductions in poverty; increasing nationalisation, price controls and centralisation; the collapse of the oil price after 2014 against an economy that had made no provision for it; and hyperinflation, shortages, and the flight of technical staff from the state oil company.
US and other sanctions, tightened progressively from 2017 and targeting the oil sector directly from 2019, are a further factor whose weight is disputed — the government attributes the collapse to them, critics point out that output was already falling steeply beforehand.
What is not disputed is the outcome. Venezuela has experienced one of the deepest peacetime economic contractions recorded anywhere, with hyperinflation that ran into the millions of per cent annually before stabilising at merely severe levels. More than seven million Venezuelans have left the country — the largest displacement crisis in the Americas and one of the largest anywhere — reshaping the demography of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Brazil in the process.
The diaspora that redrew a continent
The scale of Venezuelan emigration since 2015 has changed the demography of half of South America, and it is worth understanding because a traveller will encounter it in every country covered on this site.
Colombia has received the largest share by a wide margin and, unusually among receiving states anywhere in the world, responded with a temporary protection statute granting regularised status and access to services to millions. Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Brazil have each taken very large numbers; smaller flows have reached Argentina, Panama, Spain and the United States.
The pattern is recognisable to anyone who has watched migration elsewhere: initially professionals with savings leaving by plane, then families by bus, then people walking. The caminantes — those crossing the Colombian Andes on foot, over passes above 3,000 metres in clothing meant for Caracas — became the defining image of the crisis around 2018, and the shelters strung along the route from Cúcuta toward Bogotá are still operating.
The economic contribution has been substantial and is measured: Venezuelan arrivals have raised output in receiving countries, filled labour shortages and started businesses at high rates. The political reaction has followed the pattern that reaction always follows, and xenophobia against Venezuelans has become a live issue in several countries that were themselves sending emigrants a generation ago.
Some have gone back. Return flows have picked up at points when conditions eased marginally, which is its own kind of statement about what people were leaving.
What travel here means now
Most foreign ministries advise against all or non-essential travel to Venezuela, and this guide carries an active alert on the country for exactly that reason. That advice covers insecurity, the collapse of medical capacity, fuel and power shortages, and very limited consular assistance if something goes wrong.
It would be dishonest to write a piece about the tepuis without saying plainly that this is not currently a country to travel to casually. It would be equally dishonest to write as though nobody goes. Specialised operators do run Roraima treks and Canaima flights, Venezuelans travel domestically, and the diaspora returns to visit family.
If you are considering it, the honest checklist is: read your government’s current advisory in full and take it seriously; go with an established operator with in-country capacity rather than independently; understand that cash in hard currency is essential and card systems are unreliable; and accept that medical evacuation, not medical treatment, is the realistic contingency plan.
Angel Falls, for the record
Canaima national park is a UNESCO World Heritage site covering three million hectares of tepui country. The falls are reached by flight into Canaima camp, then a river journey by motorised dugout up the Carrao and Churún rivers, then a walk to the viewpoint at Laime — a full day each way, and only in the wet season from roughly June to November, because in the dry months the rivers are too low for the boats and the falls themselves shrink to a thread.
The name comes from Jimmie Angel, an American aviator who landed a monoplane on the summit of Auyán-tepui in 1937 looking for gold, sank it in the boggy ground, and walked down with his crew over eleven days. The aircraft sat up there for thirty-three years before being lifted off by helicopter; it is now displayed at Ciudad Bolívar airport. Venezuela officially renamed the falls Kerepakupai Merú in 2009, using the Pemón name, though the older name persists in most usage.
The Pemón have lived in this landscape for a very long time and run much of the tourism in Canaima. Their name for the tepuis — houses of the gods — assumes something about the summits that the biology, oddly, supports: what is up there is not from the same world as what is down here.
Lena writes about the places where the road ends: high passes, winter crossings, valleys with one supply truck a week. A UIAGM-certified alpinist, she reported from the Wakhan, the Pamirs and Karakoram before most maps agreed on their borders.