Mountain · Guyana, Venezuela, Brazil
Mount Roraima
Mount Roraima is a table mountain with a flat roof and walls so steep that its summit looks like an island floating above the rainforest. Three countries meet up there.
Picture credit: Paolo Costa Baldi (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Tinhojv (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Mount Roraima?
Mount Roraima is part of the Pacaraima Mountains, a tepui in the Guiana Highlands.
You will find it in: Guyana, Venezuela, Brazil.
Summit: 5.143° N, 60.763° W
The story behind it
Roraima is a tepui, a flat-topped sandstone block left over when an ancient plateau eroded away; the Pemon word tepui means house of the gods, and the name Roraima comes from roroi, blue-green, and ma, great. The rock is far older than the Andes, and the mountains took their present shape roughly 70 million years ago. On the summit plateau, rain falls almost daily and washes nutrients out of the ground, so plants that eat insects grow there instead — pitcher plants and sundews found nowhere else. A small stone marker on top shows where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet, and hikers usually come up a natural sloping ledge from the Venezuelan side called the ramp. The first recorded ascent was in 1884, by Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins with local guides, and their reports of a world on top of a cliff are often said to have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World of 1912 — that link is plausible and widely repeated, but Doyle himself also drew on a plateau in Bolivia described by the explorer Percy Fawcett, so it cannot be treated as proven. Sources also disagree about how tall Roraima is: 2 772 metres is the figure used here, while other lists give 2 810 metres for a rock formation called Maverick Rock on the Venezuelan side, and a recent survey measured the Guyanese high point at about 2 806 metres.
Find it on the globe
Mount Roraima is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How high is Mount Roraima?
About 2 772 m, though some lists say 2 810 m; either way its cliffs lift the summit plateau hundreds of metres above the savanna, and it is the highest point of Guyana.
Where is Mount Roraima?
Did Mount Roraima really inspire The Lost World?
Probably in part. The story is told everywhere, and reports from Roraima were circulating in Britain, but Arthur Conan Doyle also used a plateau in Bolivia described to him by Percy Fawcett, so nobody can name one single mountain.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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