Victoria Falls

The Zambezi reaches Victoria Falls as a broad, lazy river threaded with wooded islands, then drops in one sheer step into a crack in the basalt plateau. The curtain is about 1,708 metres wide and up to 108 metres deep at the centre. By combined width and height, that makes it the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth. The Lozi name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, is usually translated as "the smoke that thunders". The name is literal: at high water the spray column climbs several hundred metres and can be seen from tens of kilometres away. The river here is the border, with Zambia on the north and east bank and Zimbabwe on the south.

What makes the falls unusual is the geometry. The river does not tumble down a valley. It falls into a transverse chasm, the First Gorge, and leaves through a single gap roughly 110 metres wide. From there it zigzags through a chain of gorges that mark older positions of the falls, each cut back along a line of weakness in the lava. Livingstone Island and Cataract Island sit on the lip and split the flow into named sections: the Devil's Cataract, the Main Falls, Rainbow Falls and the Eastern Cataract. Below the exit, a steep path on the Zambian side leads down to the Boiling Pot, a whirlpool basin where the river turns hard into the Second Gorge. The steel arch of the Victoria Falls Bridge spans that gorge. It was completed in 1905 for Cecil Rhodes's Cape-to-Cairo railway scheme and sited so that passing trains would be wet with spray.

The season changes everything. Floodwater arrives from February to May and peaks around April. Then the spray is so thick that the face of the falls is often hidden, and anyone on the viewpoint paths gets soaked. From about September to January the flow drops to a fraction of that. Stretches of bare rock appear along the lip, the floor of the First Gorge comes into view, and on the Zambian side the Devil's Pool on Livingstone Island becomes swimmable at the right water level. The spray also feeds a strip of rainforest along the facing cliff, with ebony, ivory palm and wild date palm growing in what is otherwise mopane savannah. On the Zambian side the falls lie in Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, and on the Zimbabwean side in Victoria Falls National Park. Both are small, but they are linked to larger wildlife areas.

Local peoples knew the falls long before 1855, when David Livingstone was paddled to the island that now bears his name and gave the cataract a British queen's name. Earlier European maps already marked the site, and older Tonga and Ndebele names carry the same image of smoke and thunder. Tourism began in earnest with the railway and the Victoria Falls Hotel in the first years of the 20th century. It faltered during the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s and returned in the 1980s, along with rafting, bungee jumping from the bridge and scenic flights. The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1989 under both of its names.

Getting there

The falls sit between two towns. Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe is about 3 km away, and Livingstone in Zambia is about 9 km. Livingstone is a former colonial capital of Northern Rhodesia that lies around 10 km north of the river, with road and rail links across the bridge. The nearest airport is Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula International Airport (LVI) at Livingstone, about 12 km from the falls. The Victoria Falls Bridge carries the road and railway between the two countries, with border posts at each end, so seeing both banks means clearing immigration twice.