The Most Beautiful Waterfalls in Africa
9 places in 8 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful waterfalls in Africa are Victoria Falls (Zambia), Augrabies Falls (South Africa) and Tugela Falls (South Africa). The list covers 9 waterfalls in 8 countries. South Africa has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Much of Africa is a high plateau bounded by steep escarpments, and its rivers have to fall off the edge somewhere. The Zambezi drops into a chasm in volcanic basalt, the rivers of the Drakensberg and the Lesotho highlands plunge off cliffs of basalt more than a thousand metres high, and the Nile crashes through narrow gaps in ancient rock on its way north. The result is a set of waterfalls defined less by height alone than by sheer force and setting.
Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, known locally as Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, is a curtain of water more than a kilometre and a half wide, dropping into a narrow gorge whose spray rises high above the plain. In South Africa, Tugela Falls descends the cliffs of the Drakensberg Amphitheatre in a series of leaps, and Augrabies Falls forces the Orange River through a deep granite gorge in the dry northwest. Maletsunyane Falls in Lesotho drops in a single clean fall into a basalt gorge near Semonkong.
On the Nile, Murchison Falls squeezes the whole river through a gap only a few metres wide. The Blue Nile Falls in Ethiopia, called Tis Abay, smoking water, spread across a basalt lip in the highlands. Kalandula Falls in Angola pours the Lucala River over a broad horseshoe of rock, Ouzoud Falls in Morocco tumbles in tiers through the Middle Atlas, and Lobé Falls in Cameroon is one of the few waterfalls in the world that fall directly into the sea.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Victoria Falls | Waterfall | Zambia | ✓ |
| 2 | Augrabies Falls | Waterfall | South Africa | |
| 3 | Tugela Falls | Waterfall | South Africa | |
| 4 | Murchison Falls | Waterfall | Uganda | |
| 5 | Ouzoud Falls | Waterfall | Morocco | |
| 6 | Blue Nile Falls | Waterfall | Ethiopia | |
| 7 | Maletsunyane Falls | Waterfall | Lesotho | |
| 8 | Kalandula Falls | Waterfall | Angola | |
| 9 | Lobé Falls | Waterfall | Cameroon |
01 Victoria Falls
Zambia · 2 km from Victoria Falls17.925° S 25.858° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Jürgen_Bierlein from Pixabay What makes the falls unusual is the geometry. The river does not tumble down a valley. It falls into a transverse chasm, the First Gorge, and leaves through a single gap roughly 110 metres wide. From there it zigzags through a chain of gorges that mark older positions of the falls, each cut back along a line of weakness in the lava. Livingstone Island and Cataract Island sit on the lip and split the flow into named sections: the Devil's Cataract, the Main Falls, Rainbow Falls and the Eastern Cataract. Below the exit, a steep path on the Zambian side leads down to the Boiling Pot, a whirlpool basin where the river turns hard into the Second Gorge.
Did you know? The zigzag gorges below the falls record eight earlier positions of the waterfall, each abandoned as the river cut back along a new line of weakness in the basalt.
02 Augrabies Falls
South Africa28.591° S 20.341° E
Christian Wörtz ( woertz ) · CC BY-SA 2.5 Below the falls the river has carved a gorge some 18 km long and around 240 metres deep, its walls polished smooth and pale by water. Figures of 146 metres sometimes quoted for the falls in fact describe the height of these canyon walls. In flood the volume is immense: peak flows of about 7,800 cubic metres per second were recorded in 1988 and 6,800 in 2006, more than Niagara's highest recorded flow. Local folklore places the Grootslang, a monstrous serpent, in the depths of the pool at the foot of the falls, and early accounts include those of the Swedish traveller Hendrik Jakob Wikar in 1778.
Did you know? Hendrik Jakob Wikar, usually called Swedish, was born in Kokkola in present-day Finland and had fled Cape Town over gambling debts before reaching the falls.
03 Tugela Falls
South Africa28.752° S 28.894° E
Andynct · CC BY-SA 4.0 The catch is that height and volume don't travel together here. Tugela isn't fed by a glacier or a major river system — it's the very source of the Tugela River, starting as runoff off the Mont-aux-Sources plateau at nearly 3,200 metres — so in the dry Drakensberg winter (June–August) the flow can thin to almost nothing, leaving the famous drop looking more like a wet streak on the rock than a waterfall. It takes the summer rains to turn it back into the spectacle its height promises.
Did you know? In 2016 a Czech expedition remeasured the falls and put the total drop at 983 metres, higher than the long-cited figure of 948 metres.
04 Murchison Falls
Uganda · 31.2 km from Pakwach2.278° N 31.686° E
Yakov Fedorov · CC BY-SA 4.0 The falls take their name from Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, chosen by Samuel and Florence Baker, the first Europeans on record to see them in the 1860s. In the 1970s, under Idi Amin, they were called Kabalega Falls after Kabalega, the nineteenth-century king of Bunyoro; the renaming was never made law, and the older name returned after Amin fell. Ernest Hemingway crash-landed a light aircraft just downstream in 1954, and in 2019 the Ugandan government turned down a proposed hydropower dam here precisely to keep the falls as they are.
Did you know? Some historians have speculated that explorers sent up the Nile by Emperor Nero around AD 61 may have reached the falls, though the idea is widely doubted.
05 Ouzoud Falls
Morocco32.015° N 6.719° W
Alexander Leisser · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name is Berber and refers to grinding grain, a reminder that the falls were a working landscape long before they were a view. Small water-driven mills were built into the rock along the stream and used for wheat and olives, and the slopes around the gorge are planted with olive groves that feed the village of Tanaghmeilt at the top of the falls. The mix of terraced trees, red sandstone and white water is what makes the place so photogenic.
Did you know? As the water loses carbon dioxide it deposits porous tufa around the falls, a young rock that is still growing and forms small caves and dripstones.
06 Blue Nile Falls
Ethiopia · 25.4 km from Bahir Dar11.491° N 37.588° E
Geertchaos · CC BY-SA 4.0 The falls lie on the upper course of the river, about 30 km downstream of Bahir Dar, in the Amhara Region of the Ethiopian Highlands. The flow is now partly regulated: a weir controls the outlet of Lake Tana, and since 2003 a hydroelectric station has diverted much of the water outside the rainy season, which is when the falls appear at their fullest. The cascade also matters to biology — it acts as a barrier that has kept the fish of Lake Tana isolated from the rest of the Nile system, which helped the lake to evolve its own endemic species.
Did you know? The first European description of the falls appeared in 1565, in the memoirs of the Portuguese João Bermudes, the self-styled Patriarch of Ethiopia.
07 Maletsunyane Falls
Lesotho29.869° S 28.052° E
BagelBelt · Public domain The plunge pool throws back a deep, booming echo. Local tradition explains the sound as the wailing of people who drowned in the falls, and the noise carries well beyond the rim. The spray gave the nearest settlement its name: Semonkong means "place of smoke". The town was founded in the early 1880s as a refuge for Basotho families driven from their homes during the Basuto Gun War against the forces of the Cape Colony. It sits at about 2,275 metres in Maseru District. Around it lie open grassland, scattered villages and high ridges, among them Thaba Putsoa, which rises to 3,096 metres.
Did you know? It is often cited as one of Africa's tallest single-drop waterfalls and is second in southern Africa only to the Tugela Falls.
08 Kalandula Falls
Quedas de Calandula
Angola9.076° S 16.003° E
Paulo César Santos · CC0 The Lucala rises in Uíge Province to the north, flows south through Malanje and eventually joins the Cuanza, Angola's largest river, near Massangano in Cuanza Norte. Kalandula is the river's great moment: a broad, curving cliff over which the whole river pours into a deep gorge, throwing up clouds of spray. The flow is greatest in the rainy season, roughly February to April, when the falls run at full width.
Did you know? According to local elders, the falls were once a sacred site where rituals were held to calm the gods and ask for health and prosperity.
09 Lobé Falls
Chutes de la Lobé
Cameroon · 6.7 km from Kribi2.881° N 9.898° E
Amcaja · Public domain For the people who live along this coast, the Lobé is a sacred place as well as a beautiful one. Three communities share the area: the Batanga and the Mabi, who live along the rivers and the shore, and the Bagyeli, forest hunter-gatherers. Studies of the site describe the falls as a meeting point of these three cultures. Local belief holds that water spirits live in the pools at the foot of the cascades, and the falls have long served for offerings, for healing rituals and as a place to seek contact with these aquatic deities. Pirogues are paddled right up to the base of the falls, where fresh water meets surf, and canoes continue up the river into the forest beyond.
Did you know? That riverweed takes its scientific name from Grand Batanga, the coastal area around the falls where it was found.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful waterfalls in Africa?
- On our list, Victoria Falls (Zambia) ranks first, followed by Augrabies Falls (South Africa) and Tugela Falls (South Africa).
- Which country has the most waterfalls in Africa?
- In our collection, the most come from South Africa (2), Angola (1) and Cameroon (1).
- Why is Victoria Falls called the smoke that thunders?
- Mosi-oa-Tunya, its name in the Lozi language, describes the column of spray thrown up as the Zambezi drops into its gorge. When the river is high, the mist can be seen from tens of kilometres away and the roar heard from far off.
- Is Tugela Falls the highest waterfall in Africa?
- Tugela Falls in South Africa is generally cited as the highest waterfall in Africa and the second highest in the world after Angel Falls, with a total drop of about 948 metres over five leaps.
- Which African waterfall falls into the sea?
- Lobé Falls near Kribi in Cameroon, where the Lobé River cascades over rocks directly into the Atlantic Ocean, is one of the few waterfalls in the world to flow straight into the sea.
- How many waterfalls are on this list in Africa?
- The list covers 9 waterfalls in 8 countries. South Africa has the most, with 2.