The Most Spectacular Tepuis in the World
3 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular tepuis in the world are Mount Roraima (Venezuela), Kukenán Tepuy (Venezuela) and Cerro Autana (Venezuela). The list covers 3 tepuis. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A tepui is a table mountain of the Guiana Shield: a block of ancient sandstone, among the oldest exposed rock on Earth, standing alone above the rainforest and savanna with sheer walls on every side. The flat summits are worlds of their own, cut off for millions of years, with black rock, pools, carnivorous plants and species found nowhere else. Waterfalls drop straight off the rim, and clouds sit on the tops for much of the year, so the mountains seem to appear and vanish. The Pemon name is usually translated as "house of the gods".
Among the places here is Kukenán Tepuy in Venezuela, a dark wall streaked with water that stands beside Roraima and sends one of the tallest falls of the region down its face. Cerro Autana, in the Venezuelan Amazon, rises like a tree stump above the forest and is pierced near its summit by a cave that passes clean through the mountain. Mount Roraima, where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet, is the best known of them all and the mountain linked with Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.
The places here were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens into separate pages by country.
01 Mount Roraima
Venezuela5.142° N 60.764° W
Tinhojv · CC BY-SA 4.0 Geologists call formations like this a tepui — "house of the gods" in the language of the Pemón, the Indigenous people who have lived around it the longest — and the name fits better than most translated place-names do. Roraima is less a peak than an island: a sandstone plateau roughly 31 square kilometres across, walled in on every side by cliffs that drop 400 metres more or less straight down. Whatever lives up there arrived by extraordinary means and then stayed, cut off from the surrounding lowlands for somewhere between 70 and 90 million years.
Did you know? Three countries meet on the summit plateau: roughly 85% of it lies in Venezuela, 10% in Guyana and 5% in Brazil, with a marker at the tripoint.
02 Kukenán Tepuy
Venezuela5.202° N 60.828° W
Paolo Costa Baldi · CC BY-SA 3.0 Kukenán, also known as Matawi or Cuquenán, is one of the great table mountains of the Gran Sabana in south-eastern Venezuela: a sandstone block about three kilometres long rising to 2,680 metres, its summit plateau of more than 21 square kilometres ringed on every side by sheer cliffs hundreds of metres high. It stands right beside Mount Roraima, its better-known neighbour to the south-east, and from the savanna below the two look like twin fortresses with a gap of sky between them. Both lie in Canaima National Park, the vast protected area of tepuis, rivers and savannas in the Guiana Highlands.
Did you know? The pebble toad, known only from Kukenán and neighbouring Yuruaní tepui, escapes danger by curling into a ball and tumbling down the rock like a loose stone.
03 Cerro Autana
Venezuela4.855° N 67.450° W
Ldberriz · CC BY-SA 3.0 Cerro Autana looks like the stump of a colossal tree left standing in the rainforest — and that is exactly what the Piaroa people who live around it say it is. Rising sheer from the lowland jungle of Venezuela's Amazonas state, near the Colombian border, this sandstone tower tops out at roughly 1,200 metres, with vertical walls on every side. It is one of the most striking silhouettes among the tepuis, the sandstone table mountains of northern South America, and it stands alone above the green canopy and the rivers that wind through it.
Did you know? A Venezuelan pilot, Jaime Marull, is reported to have flown an ultralight aircraft straight through the mountain's cave, a stunt apparently never repeated.
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 is a tepui?
- A tepui is a flat-topped mountain with vertical cliffs, made of very old sandstone and quartzite, found in the Guiana Highlands of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. Their isolated summits support many plants and animals that live nowhere else.
- What is the most beautiful tepui?
- On our list, Mount Roraima (Venezuela) ranks first, followed by Kukenán Tepuy (Venezuela) and Cerro Autana (Venezuela).
- Which country has the most tepuis?
- In our collection, all of them are in Venezuela.
- Which famous waterfall falls from a tepui?
- Angel Falls, the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world, drops from the edge of Auyán-tepui in Venezuela.
- How many tepuis are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 3 tepuis.
- Which is the highest of the tepuis in the world?
- Mount Roraima (Venezuela) is the highest on this list, at 2,810 metres.