The Most Beautiful Waterfalls in South America
9 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful waterfalls in South America are Iguaçu Falls (Brazil), Angel Falls (Venezuela) and Kaieteur Falls (Guyana). The list covers 9 waterfalls in 7 countries. Brazil has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South America drops water from some of the oldest and some of the youngest rock on Earth. In the north, the tepuis of the Guiana Shield are flat-topped tablelands of Precambrian sandstone whose sheer walls send rivers straight off the edge into free fall. Farther south, the Paraná and Iguazu rivers cross the stepped basalt of an ancient lava plateau and break into curtains of cascades, while the Andes catch Pacific and Amazonian rain and pour it down steep volcanic valleys. Few continents combine such height, such volume and such variety in one place.
Iguaçu Falls spreads hundreds of separate drops along the edge of a basalt shelf on the border of Brazil and Argentina, with the U-shaped Devil's Throat at its heart. Angel Falls leaps from the rim of Auyán-tepui in Venezuela as the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world, and Kaieteur Falls in Guyana sends the Potaro River over a single sandstone ledge with enormous force. In the Peruvian cloud forest, the two-tiered Gocta Cataracts became widely known only in the twenty-first century.
The rest of the list shows how many forms a waterfall can take. Cachoeira da Fumaça in Brazil's Chapada Diamantina falls so far that much of it turns to mist before it lands. The Moconá falls run lengthwise along the Uruguay River instead of across it, Pailón del Diablo churns through a rock cauldron near Baños in Ecuador, the Petrohué rapids race over black basalt beneath the cone of Osorno, and Cachoeira Santa Bárbara fills a turquoise pool in the savanna of the Brazilian highlands.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Iguaçu Falls | Waterfall | Brazil | |
| 2 | Angel Falls | Waterfall | Venezuela | |
| 3 | Kaieteur Falls | Waterfall | Guyana | |
| 4 | Gocta Cataracts | Waterfall | Peru | |
| 5 | Cachoeira da Fumaça | Waterfall | Brazil | |
| 6 | Moconá Waterfalls | Waterfall | Argentina | |
| 7 | Pailón del Diablo | Waterfall | Ecuador | |
| 8 | Petrohué Waterfalls | Waterfall | Chile | |
| 9 | Cachoeira Santa Bárbara | Waterfall | Brazil |
01 Iguaçu Falls
Cataratas do Iguaçu
Brazil · 21.2 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.695° S 54.437° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The falls' erosion has a rhythm you can put a number on. Garganta del Diablo — the Devil's Throat — is a U-shaped chasm that swallows roughly half the entire river's flow through an 82-metre drop, and it keeps eating into the basalt: water undercuts the resistant caprock, hollowing a cavern beneath it until the unsupported rock above collapses, and the whole gorge creeps upstream by about a metre every decade. Run that backward and the falls have retreated something like 30 kilometres from where they first formed.
Did you know? According to legend, a serpent god created the falls in rage when the woman Naipí fled with her mortal lover Tarobá in a canoe.
02 Angel Falls
Salto Ángel
Venezuela5.970° N 62.536° W
JhonnyCatanho · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Pemon people call it Kerepakupai Merú, the waterfall of the deepest place. The English name comes from Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who flew over the falls on 16 November 1933 while searching for a valuable ore deposit. In 1937 he returned and tried to land on top of the tepui; the wheels of his monoplane sank into the marshy ground, and he and three companions, his wife among them, spent eleven days walking down off the plateau. The aircraft stayed up there for 33 years before being lifted out by helicopter and restored; it now stands outside the airport of Ciudad Bolívar.
Did you know? Aleksandrs Laime named the river above the falls Gauja, after a Latvian river, on Latvian independence day in 1955, and the name entered Venezuela's official maps.
03 Kaieteur Falls
Guyana5.178° N 59.482° W
Dan Sloan · CC BY-SA 2.0 The name comes from a Patamona legend, not a surveyor's label. It tells of an elder chief named Kaie who deliberately paddled his canoe over the falls as a sacrifice, appeasing a great water spirit to save his people from a raid — the falls were named for him afterward. European record-keeping arrived much later and far less dramatically: Charles Barrington Brown, a British government geologist surveying the colony, came across the falls in 1870, didn't have time to survey them properly, and returned a year later to take proper measurements.
Did you know? The golden rocket frog breeds only inside one bromeliad species, Brocchinia micrantha, which grows on the plateau around the falls.
04 Gocta Cataracts
Gocta
Peru · 22.9 km from Chachapoyas6.023° S 77.887° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 The strangest part of Gocta's story is how recently the wider world learned of it. People in the surrounding villages had always known the falls, but kept away: local tradition speaks of a beautiful fair-haired mermaid living in its pool, a spirit whose long pale hair is the water itself, and of a curse on those who come too close. In 2002 the German explorer Stefan Ziemendorff, working in the area, saw it and set out to measure it, and after his third expedition he announced its height at a press conference in March 2006, with the measurement confirmed by the Peruvian authorities.
Did you know? Even within Peru it is not the tallest: Las Tres Hermanas in Junín and Yumbilla in Amazonas are both higher.
05 Cachoeira da Fumaça
Brazil12.601° S 41.455° W
r m · CC BY 2.0 The top of the falls lies at about 1,280 metres above sea level. From the rim the view opens over the valley and the rock formations typical of the Chapada. Brazil's geological survey calls the falls one of the most monumental and most visited sites in the region. For a long time they were thought to be the highest waterfall in Brazil, until the Cachoeira do Araçá in the state of Amazonas, about 353 metres, became known. Fumaça is still among the tallest in the country. The landscape around it was proposed in 2010 for World Heritage status because of its unusual landforms. Local people had always known the falls, and in English they are sometimes also called Glass Falls.
Did you know? Among Brazil's very tallest waterfalls, Fumaça is the one that is easiest to reach.
06 Moconá Waterfalls
Saltos del Moconá
Argentina27.143° S 53.887° W
Loco085 · CC BY-SA 2.5 The drops themselves are modest, generally between about 5 and 10 metres, and their appearance depends on the river: the falls only show when the Uruguay is running low, and at high water the river swallows them entirely. The name suits that habit. In Guaraní, Moconá is usually translated as "the one that swallows everything", while Yucumã is said to mean "great fall". Because the international border follows the deepest channel of the river, almost all of the falls lie on the Argentine side, although the Brazilian bank gives a broad view of the water spilling into the basalt cleft.
Did you know? Along the falls the submerged trench is only about 30 metres wide but is estimated to be roughly 90 to 120 metres deep.
07 Pailón del Diablo
Cascada el Pailón del Diablo
Ecuador · 35.6 km from Puyo1.404° S 78.297° W
Krosto · CC BY-SA 3.0 Local folklore gives the place a companion. A short way off is the San Miguel waterfall, said to stand for the archangel Michael, who keeps watch so that the devil stays trapped down in his cauldron. Between the two lies the Encañada del Duende, a small hidden lagoon of emerald water ringed by tropical plants.
Did you know? Local man Ángel Lascano said he helped coin the name in the 1940s, and was reportedly excommunicated by the parish priest for insisting on 'Diablo'.
08 Petrohué Waterfalls
Saltos de Petrohué
Chile41.172° S 72.447° W
P. Hughes · CC BY 4.0 The colour is the second surprise. In normal conditions the water is clear with a green and blue cast, bright against the volcanic stone; during the thaw it can turn brown and dark. Above it all rises the cone of Osorno, 2,652 m high, so that from the viewpoints the falls, the rock that made them and the volcano that produced that rock appear in a single frame.
Did you know? The river runs over young volcanic andesite, while its steep left bank is formed of much older granodiorite.
09 Cachoeira Santa Bárbara
Brazil13.540° S 47.493° W
Rafael Defavari · CC BY-SA 4.0 The falls belong to Engenho II, one of the settlements of the Kalunga people. The Kalunga descend from enslaved Africans who escaped from the gold workings of eighteenth-century Goiás into the remote valleys of the region, where their communities lived largely cut off for generations and developed their own blend of African, rural Catholic and Indigenous traditions. In 1991 the state of Goiás created the Kalunga Historical Site and Cultural Heritage area, which covers roughly 253,000 hectares across the municipalities of Cavalcante, Monte Alegre de Goiás and Teresina de Goiás and is the largest quilombola territory in Brazil.
Did you know? In Bantu languages of west-central Africa, Kalunga is also a name for God and for the watery boundary between the living and the ancestors.
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 South America?
- On our list, Iguaçu Falls (Brazil) ranks first, followed by Angel Falls (Venezuela) and Kaieteur Falls (Guyana).
- Which country has the most waterfalls in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Brazil (3), Argentina (1) and Chile (1).
- What is the highest waterfall in the world?
- Angel Falls in Venezuela's Canaima National Park, with a total height of about 979 metres and an unbroken plunge of about 807 metres from the rim of Auyán-tepui.
- Why is it called Angel Falls?
- It is named after the American aviator Jimmie Angel, who flew over the falls in the 1930s and later landed his plane on top of Auyán-tepui. Its Pemón name is Kerepakupai Merú.
- Is Iguazu Falls in Brazil or Argentina?
- Both. The falls lie on the Iguazu River where it forms the border between the two countries; the larger share of the cascades is on the Argentine side, and the Devil's Throat sits on the border itself.
- How many waterfalls are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 9 waterfalls in 7 countries. Brazil has the most, with 3.