Maletsunyane Falls
Interesting facts
- The falls are also known as Le Bihan Falls, after the French missionary François Le Bihan, reportedly the first European to see them, in 1881.
- It is often cited as one of Africa's tallest single-drop waterfalls and is second in southern Africa only to the Tugela Falls.
- The lip of the falls lies at roughly 2,200 metres above sea level, high in the mountains of Lesotho.
- In winter the falls are often partly frozen; average July night-time lows in nearby Semonkong fall to about minus five degrees Celsius.
- The Maletsunyane River feeds the Orange River, so water plunging here ends its journey in the Atlantic Ocean.
- The 2017 basketball record set here was eventually beaten in May 2023 by Dude Perfect, shooting from The Strat tower in Las Vegas.
Why it is worth it
In the highlands of Lesotho, the Maletsunyane River runs to the edge of a basalt shelf and drops 192 metres in a single plunge into a deep, sheer-sided gorge. It is a horsetail fall: rather than breaking into separate steps, the water stays close to the cliff the whole way down, a long white band that fans out over the dark rock and fills the floor of the gorge with spray. The ledge it pours from is basalt, laid down as lava around the boundary of the Triassic and Jurassic periods.
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.
The scale of the drop has drawn people who want to measure themselves against it. A commercial abseil into the gorge, run from Semonkong and 204 metres long, entered the Guinness records as the longest of its kind in the world. In December 2017 an Australian YouTube team made a world-record basketball shot from the top of the gorge, a record that lasted until 2023. Such stunts come and go; what stays is the gorge, the falling water and its echo.
Getting there
The falls lie about 6 km from the town of Semonkong, in Maseru District. The capital, Maseru, is about 83 km away in a straight line, and Moshoeshoe I International Airport (MSU), which serves it, is about 66 km from the falls. Quthing, in the south of the country, lies about 68 km away in a straight line, but there is no direct route across the mountains.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Maletsunyane Falls is a 192-metre-high (630 ft) waterfall in the Southern African country Lesotho. It is located near the town of Semonkong, which is also named after the falls. The waterfall is on the Maletsunyane River and it falls from a ledge of Triassic-Jurassic basalt.
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