Iguaçu Falls

Interesting facts

The name comes from the Guarani or Tupi words for water and big.

According to legend, a serpent god created the falls in rage when the woman Naipí fled with her mortal lover Tarobá in a canoe.

The Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is recorded as the first European to see the falls, in 1541.

On seeing the falls, Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have exclaimed simply, Poor Niagara!

At about 2.7 kilometres, the falls are more than twice as wide as Niagara and much wider than Victoria Falls.

On 9 June 2014 floodwaters pushed the flow to a record of about 45,700 cubic metres per second, some 26 times the average.

In 2006 a severe drought cut the flow to around 300 cubic metres per second for months.

About 80 percent of the falls lie on the Argentine side, with the remaining fifth in Brazil.

The falls appear in the films Moonraker (1979) and The Mission (1986).

The Argentine and Brazilian national parks around the falls became UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1984 and 1986.

Why it is worth it

The rock under Iguaçu is 130 million years old and volcanic, laid down when massive flood-basalt eruptions covered a huge swath of what would become southern Brazil and Argentina in repeated lava flows, some sequences over a kilometre thick. That same eruptive event, geologists now think, is tied to the breakup of Gondwana and the opening of the South Atlantic — basalts of the same family show up today across the ocean in Namibia's Etendeka region, meaning the rock the water is falling over here and rock exposed on another continent were once part of the same lava field.

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.

Split across roughly 275 individual cascades over nearly three kilometres, the falls also do double duty as habitat: great dusky swifts nest directly inside the curtain of falling water, flying straight through the spray to reach ledges no predator can follow them to. Seeing the falls properly means picking a side — Brazil's trails give the wide panoramic view across the whole system, while Argentina's catwalks put you on a platform suspended right over the Devil's Throat itself, close enough to be soaked by it.

Good to know

Brazil's side gives the panoramic overview and is the quicker visit; Argentina's side involves more walking but gets you onto catwalks directly over the Devil's Throat. Combining both in one trip means an international border crossing, so check visa requirements first.

Best time to visit

Flow varies hugely by season: November–March, the wetter months, brings the most powerful display, occasionally multiplying volume tenfold after storms; July–August tends to run lower, separating the 275 cascades into more distinct threads.

Getting there

17 km from Puerto Iguazú. Cataratas Del Iguazú International Airport (IGR) is about 6 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Iguazú Falls or Iguaçu Falls are waterfalls of the Iguazu River on the border of the Argentine province of Misiones and the Brazilian state of Paraná. Together, they make up the largest waterfall system in the world. The falls divide the river into the upper and lower Iguazu. The Iguazu River rises near the heart of the city of Curitiba. For most of its course, the river flows through Brazil; however, most of the falls are on the Argentine side. Below its confluence with the San Antonio River, the Iguazu River forms the border between Argentina and Brazil.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0