How big is Kaieteur Falls, really?
226 metres straight down, more than four times the height of Niagara, with enough water to rank among the most powerful waterfalls on Earth. Here are the numbers, and what they feel like when you're standing there.
Video "Aerial View of Kaieteur Falls in Guyana" by ViralHog, shown with YouTube's player. Watch on YouTube.
People call Kaieteur "the world's largest single-drop waterfall", and that phrase gets misread a lot. It isn't the tallest waterfall in the world. Angel Falls in Venezuela is far taller. What makes Kaieteur special is the combination: a huge amount of water falling a very long way in one clean drop.
The numbers
- Single drop: 226 metres (741 feet), straight down from the edge of the Kaieteur plateau into the gorge.
- Total height: about 251 metres (822 feet) if you count the cascades below the main drop.
- Width: on average around 113 metres (371 feet). In the rainy season it can spread wider.
- Water: an average of about 663 cubic metres per second (around 23,400 cubic feet per second).
- River: the Potaro, which flows on to join the Essequibo.
Compared with the famous ones
- Niagara Falls: Kaieteur's drop is more than four times the height of Niagara's.
- Victoria Falls: Kaieteur's drop is roughly twice as high.
- Angel Falls: Angel is much taller, but carries far less water. Its water often turns to mist on the way down.
Very few waterfalls on the planet combine Kaieteur's height with its volume of water. That's why it regularly appears on lists of the most powerful waterfalls in the world, and why visitors describe hearing it before they see it.
What it's like in person
Numbers don't really prepare you. What visitors talk about afterwards is the scale: there are no buildings, no railings and no crowds to give you a sense of size, just rainforest, the gorge and the water. Someone standing at a viewpoint looks tiny next to it. Many people say the sound and the vibration surprised them more than the height.
You also see it from the air. On a clear day, the flight in from Georgetown takes you over the falls, so you get the full drop and the gorge from above before you land.
Is it always this big?
No. Kaieteur changes with the seasons. After the rains, the falls are wide and thundering, with a lot of mist. In the drier months the flow is lower but still powerful, and the views are often clearer. Read our guide to [when to visit Kaieteur](/stories/when-to-visit-kaieteur-falls) to choose your timing.
The aerial video above, shared by ViralHog, gives a good sense of the drop from above.
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