Mount Roraima
Interesting facts
- 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.
- The plateau's sandstone is Proterozoic, deposited some 1.7 to 2 billion years ago, and is made almost entirely of silica grains.
- Beneath the plateau, cavers from Venezuela and the Oxford University Cave Club mapped a quartz cave system more than 15 kilometres long, described as the largest of its kind.
- The name is usually traced to Pemón words meaning "blue-green" and "great".
- The main summit, 2,810 metres, sits on the plateau's Venezuelan southern edge, while Guyana's highest point, 2,772 metres, lies on the same tabletop about 8 km to the north.
- Robert Schomburgk reached the mountain in 1838, but the summit was first climbed only on 18 December 1884, by Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins.
- Among the plateau's endemics are the tiny Roraima bush toad, Oreophrynella quelchii, and the carnivorous marsh pitcher plant Heliamphora nutans.
- Rain falls on the summit for much of the year, with annual totals of more than 1,500 millimetres and far higher in the wettest stretches.
Why it is worth it
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.
That isolation shows in the biology. Around 35% of the species found on Roraima's summit are endemic — found nowhere else on the planet — including carnivorous plants and frogs that never developed the ability to survive outside this one plateau. Crossing the top, past black quartz formations and pools scoured into bare rock, feels less like hiking and more like visiting a separate planet's biosphere that happened to form on this one.
It is not a coincidence that the mountain shows up in fiction more than once. Arthur Conan Doyle read nineteenth-century explorers' accounts of the tepui and used it as the model for his 1912 novel The Lost World, imagining dinosaurs surviving on an isolated plateau — a premise that turned out to be broadly right about the isolation, if not the dinosaurs. Some later commentators have also pointed to Roraima's floating-island silhouette as a likely visual reference for the Pixar film Up, though that link is speculative rather than confirmed by the filmmakers.
Getting there
71 km from Santa Elena de Uairén. Santa Elena de Uairén Airport (SNV) is about 78 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Kukenán Tepuy 9.7 km · tepui
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mount Roraima is the highest of the Pacaraima chain of tepuis or plateaux in South America. It is located at the junction of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela. A characteristic, large, flat-topped mountain surrounded by cliffs 400–1,000 m (1,300–3,300 ft) high, its highest point is located on the southern edge of the cliff at an elevation of 2,810 m (9,220 ft) in Venezuela. Another protrusion at an elevation of 2,772 m (9,094 ft) at the junction of the three countries in the north of the plateau is the highest point in Guyana. The name Mount Roraima came from the native Pemon people. Roroi in the Pemon language means "blue-green", and ma means "great".
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
5.14194, -60.76417per Wikidata