Murchison Falls
Interesting facts
- In 1962 heavy floods cut a second channel beside the main fall, creating Uhuru Falls, named after the Swahili word for freedom in Uganda's independence year.
- Some historians have speculated that explorers sent up the Nile by Emperor Nero around AD 61 may have reached the falls, though the idea is widely doubted.
- Samuel and Florence Baker reached the falls in 1864 during their expedition in search of the sources of the Nile.
- Between 1907 and 1912 about 13,000 square kilometres around the falls were cleared of people because of sleeping sickness, land that later became a national park in 1952.
- The river below the falls supports Uganda's largest population of Nile crocodiles, and the surrounding park has recorded around 450 bird species.
- Giraffe numbers in the park rose from about 250 in 2010 to roughly 1,500 by 2017.
Why it is worth it
Few waterfalls owe their force so plainly to a single constriction. Shortly before it reaches Lake Albert, the Nile is forced through a cleft in the rock barely seven metres across, and the whole river — something like 300 cubic metres of water every second — is squeezed through that gap before dropping about 43 metres into the pool below. What reaches the eye is less a curtain than an explosion: a white jet of water, a permanent cloud of spray and a noise that carries far across the bush of northwestern Uganda.
The falls take their name from Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, chosen by Samuel and Florence Baker, the first Europeans on record to see them in the 1860s. In the 1970s, under Idi Amin, they were called Kabalega Falls after Kabalega, the nineteenth-century king of Bunyoro; the renaming was never made law, and the older name returned after Amin fell. Ernest Hemingway crash-landed a light aircraft just downstream in 1954, and in 2019 the Ugandan government turned down a proposed hydropower dam here precisely to keep the falls as they are.
The waterfall gave its name to Murchison Falls National Park, roughly 5,000 square kilometres of savanna, riverine forest and papyrus swamp, the largest protected area in the country. Two views are worth combining. From the water, the launch that runs upstream from Paraa passes hippo pods, Nile crocodiles, elephants and buffalo coming down to drink, with fish eagles and, with luck, a shoebill in the reeds, before stopping below the plunge pool with the falls framed at the end of the gorge. From the top, a short path leads to the lip of the chasm, where you can stand within a few metres of the river as it hurls itself through the slot — the more startling of the two perspectives.
Getting there
The falls lie inside the national park, near the Paraa river crossing, which is about 25 km from the town of Pakwach (roughly 29 km from the falls by straight line). The nearest airport with scheduled services in the region is Gulu Airport (ULU), about 88 km away; most visitors, though, arrive by road from Masindi, about 86 km southeast of Paraa, or fly into Pakuba airstrip, some 14 km west of Paraa. Boat trips to the base of the falls leave from the Paraa jetty and take a few hours for the round trip; the top of the falls can be reached by a hike up from the boat landing or by driving to the upper car park.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Murchison Falls, also known as Kabalega Falls, is a waterfall in Uganda, located at the apex of Lake Albert on the White Nile. At the top of Murchison Falls, the Nile forces its way through a gap in the rocks, only 7 m (23 ft) wide, and tumbles 43 m (141 ft), before flowing westward into Lake Albert. The outlet of Lake Victoria sends around 300 m3/s (11,000 cu ft/s) of water over the falls, squeezed into a gorge less than 10 m (33 ft) wide.
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