Cachoeira da Fumaça — waterfall
r m · CC BY 2.0

Cachoeira da Fumaça

  • Elevation1,280 m
  • 2 min read
  • 12.601° S 41.455° W

Interesting facts

  • The name Glass Falls honours the bush pilot George Glass, whose sighting in 1960 brought the waterfall to wider attention.
  • Among Brazil's very tallest waterfalls, Fumaça is the one that is easiest to reach.
  • In Dhoom 2, Aishwarya Rai's character leaps from the cliff with no safety gear, and Hrithik Roshan's character dives after her on a bungee cord.
  • The region's name joins chapada, a cliff-edged plateau, with Diamantina, after the diamonds found in these hills in the mid-19th century.
  • The surrounding national park covers about 152,000 hectares and contains Bahia's highest point, Pico do Barbado at 2,036 metres.
  • The Sincorá Range around the falls forces moist Atlantic air upward, giving its eastern side noticeably more rain than the dry country inland.
  • The plateau is a great divide: its streams drain either to the São Francisco River or eastward to the Paraguaçu and de Contas rivers.
  • The park is home to the hooded visorbearer, a hummingbird found nowhere else, along with several endemic orchids.

Why it is worth it

Cachoeira da Fumaça, "Smoke Falls", drops about 340 metres from the edge of the highlands of the Chapada Diamantina of Bahia, Brazil. For most of the year the falls hardly reach the ground at all. The stream at the lip is thin, and over such a height the wind tears it into spray long before it reaches the bottom. Gusts rising from the Vale do Capão below often push the drifting water back up past the rim, so that the fall seems to smoke rather than pour. Depending on the season, the stream can also dry up completely.

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. The cliff appeared on screen in the 2006 Bollywood film Dhoom 2, in a scene where a character leaps from the edge.

The falls lie in the municipality of Palmeiras, inside Chapada Diamantina National Park, created by federal decree in 1985. The nearest village is Caeté-Açu in the Vale do Capão. There are two classic ways to see the falls. One is a walk of about 6 km from the valley up to the rim, with the drop opening straight below. The other is a trek of about three days from the town of Lençóis to the foot of the cliff, where the full height is seen from below.

Getting there

The falls are about 40 km from Seabra and about 18 km from Palmeiras, the nearest towns, with the walk to the rim starting in the Vale do Capão near Caeté-Açu. Lençóis Airport (LEC), which serves the national park, is about 23 km away in a straight line. The nearest larger airport is Vitória da Conquista (VDC), about 262 km to the south; Salvador (SSA) on the coast is about 340 km to the east.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Brazil 44The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Brazil 8The Most Beautiful Waterfalls 90The Most Beautiful Water Wonders 429

From the encyclopaedia

The Cachoeira da Fumaça is 340-metre-tall (1,120 ft) waterfall in Bahia, Brazil. It was believed to be the country's highest waterfall until the 353 m-tall (1,158 ft) Cachoeira do Araca was recently discovered in the state of Amazonas.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

-12.60062, -41.45510per Wikidata