Tugela Falls

Interesting facts

The falls drop off the Amphitheatre, a rock wall more than 5 kilometres long whose cliffs rise about 1,200 metres along almost its whole length.

In 2016 a Czech expedition remeasured the falls and put the total drop at 983 metres, higher than the long-cited figure of 948 metres.

The Zulu name uThukela is usually translated as sudden, a fitting name for a river that begins with a near-kilometre plunge.

The plateau above the falls was named Mont-aux-Sources, the mountain of springs, by French missionaries in 1836.

Rivers rising on the same plateau flow to two oceans: the Tugela east to the Indian Ocean, others via the Orange River west to the Atlantic.

In very cold winters the upper fall can freeze into columns of ice, a rare sight in southern Africa.

The cliffs of the Amphitheatre served as a backdrop for the 1964 film Zulu, though the real battle site lies about 160 kilometres away.

The waterfall lies within Royal Natal National Park, part of the Maloti-Drakensberg World Heritage Site in KwaZulu-Natal.

Why it is worth it

The single leap most people mean when they talk about Tugela is 411 metres — taller than most entire waterfalls anywhere else — and it's only the top tier of a five-stage cascade off the Amphitheatre, the sheer wall of the northern Drakensberg, that adds up to somewhere between 947 and 983 metres depending on whose survey you trust. By most reckonings that makes it the second-tallest waterfall on the planet, behind only Venezuela's Angel Falls, and there's an ongoing argument among waterfall surveyors that measurement uncertainty on Angel Falls could put Tugela in first place instead.

The catch is that height and volume don't travel together here. Tugela isn't fed by a glacier or a major river system — it's the very source of the Tugela River, starting as runoff off the Mont-aux-Sources plateau at nearly 3,200 metres — so in the dry Drakensberg winter (June–August) the flow can thin to almost nothing, leaving the famous drop looking more like a wet streak on the rock than a waterfall. It takes the summer rains to turn it back into the spectacle its height promises.

There's also no easy way to see it. No road reaches a viewpoint: the two options are a strenuous hike up chain ladders to the top of the Amphitheatre plateau for a view straight down the drop, or a long approach along the Tugela Gorge trail from below, looking up. Both routes demand a full day and reasonable fitness, which is probably the biggest reason the world's second-tallest waterfall stays this uncrowded.

Best time to visit

December to March, the summer rains, for the flow to actually match the height; in the dry winter months the falls can reduce to a trickle or disappear.

Getting there

26 km from Phuthaditjhaba. Moshoeshoe I International Airport (MSU) is about 152 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Tugela Falls is a complex of seasonal waterfalls located in the Drakensberg of Royal Natal National Park in KwaZulu-Natal Province, Republic of South Africa. According to some measurements, it is the world's tallest waterfall. A revisited validation of waterfall measurements is not available and there is still uncertainty whether Tugela or Venezuela's Angel Falls is the tallest.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0