Venezuela

Caracas sits in a valley at 900m, hemmed in by the Avila National Park mountain directly to the north and urban sprawl to all other directions. The Plaza Bolivar (the founding square of every Spanish colonial city in Venezuela) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (the finest modern art collection in Latin America, assembled by former dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s).

💡 Cota 905 in western Caracas and other barrio hillsides have among the highest murder rates of any urban area in the world — Venezuela has experienced a significant security crisis since 2013. The tourist areas of the east (Chacao, Altamira, Las Mercedes) are significantly safer. Travel with a local guide throughout and research current conditions.

1h20 flight from Caracas to Canaima Airport. Canaima National Park (UNESCO World Heritage Site, the sixth-largest national park in the world at 30,000km²) — a landscape of tepuis (sandstone table mountains rising vertically from the jungle, up to 2,810m) formed 1.8 billion years ago, the oldest geological formations on earth.

💡 The tepuis of Canaima are so isolated that each has evolved its own endemic species — the summit of Roraima has plants, insects and frogs found nowhere else. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based The Lost World (1912) on reports of the tepuis — he imagined dinosaurs surviving on the isolated summit plateaus.

Angel Falls (Salto Ángel, 979m total drop, 807m uninterrupted free fall — the highest waterfall in the world, 19 times the height of Niagara) is accessible only by light aircraft + 3h dugout canoe through the jungle + 1h walk. It was unknown outside Venezuela until American pilot Jimmy Angel landed on the summit of Auyan-tepui in 1937.

💡 Jimmy Angel crash-landed his plane on top of Auyan-tepui (the tepui from which Angel Falls drops) on 9 October 1937 and spent 11 days walking out through the jungle. His plane remained on the summit for 33 years before being airlifted. The falls are named after him; the Venezuelan government officially renamed them Kerepakupai Merú (the original Pemon name) in 2009.

5h drive from Canaima. The Gran Sabana — a vast highland savanna at 800–1,200m, dotted with tepuis, with the Roraima (2,810m, the triple-border summit of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana) as its centrepiece and hundreds of waterfalls descending from the plateau edges — is the most primeval landscape in South America.

💡 Roraima is the highest tepui and the most trekked — a 6-day return journey from the base camp at Paraitepuy, with a fixed guide requirement. The summit plateau (34km²) has its own endemic ecosystem: carnivorous sundews, black quartz crystals, a species of frog that doesn’t jump (Oreophrynella quelchii) and clouds that form at eye level.

The waterfalls of the Gran Sabana: Salto Kama (100m over a sheer sandstone lip), Salto Yuruani and the natural jacuzzi pools below the Quebrada de Jaspe (a riverbed paved entirely in red jasper — an extraordinary natural phenomenon unique to this valley). The Pemon indigenous communities sell crafts and serve as mandatory guides.

💡 The Quebrada de Jaspe — a river whose entire bed is a continuous sheet of red and yellow jasper (a variety of quartz), polished smooth by millennia of water — is a genuinely improbable sight. The jasper extends 200m upstream. Wading in the river over the red rock is permitted.

2h30 flight from Santa Elena to Barinas or Calabozo. The Los Llanos (a 300,000km² seasonal floodplain — the Orinoco River basin grasslands) — giant anteaters, giant river otters, anacondas, capybaras, spectacled caimans (200 per km of river in the dry season) and 3 million migratory birds.

💡 Venezuela’s Los Llanos has the highest concentration of capybara in the world — the world’s largest rodent (65kg), living in herds of 30–100, entirely indifferent to visitors. The dry-season spectacled caiman density (January–March) exceeds the Nile in Egypt — counts of 200 caimans per kilometre of riverbank have been recorded on the Apure tributaries.

Dawn horse safari through the flooded llanos (the most atmospheric way to see the wildlife — scarlet ibis returning to roost, anacondas crossing the road, giant anteaters foraging in the morning light) and afternoon flight from Barinas or Maracay to Caracas for international connections.

💡 The giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) was nearly extinct in Venezuela by 1970; populations in the Los Llanos have recovered to several hundred individuals under protection. They hunt in family groups, are highly vocal, and regard boats with apparent curiosity rather than fear.