River · Venezuela
Orinoco
The Orinoco is the great river of Venezuela and one of the mightiest in South America. It draws a huge curve through rainforest and grassland and reaches the Atlantic through a wide delta.
Picture credit: Venecon (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Luis Rivas (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Jermaingarciafg (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Orinoco?
The river starts here: Sierra Parima in southern Venezuela.
It ends in the Atlantic Ocean through the Orinoco Delta.
Countries on the river: Venezuela.
The story behind it
The Orinoco rises in the forested Sierra Parima and then swings in a giant arc through Venezuela. In the rainy season it floods the llanos, the flat grasslands, until they look like a shallow sea with islands of palm trees. Then capybaras swim between the stems, caimans wait in the warm shallows and scarlet ibises glow like red lamps in the trees. Rare pink river dolphins hunt in the muddy current. Later the water sinks again, and the same plains dry out and crack. Boats carry iron ore and cattle past Ciudad Bolívar, and in the delta the Warao build their houses on stilts above the water. For part of its course the Orinoco marks the border with Colombia, and experts still give slightly different figures for its exact length.
Questions children ask
How long is the Orinoco?
The Orinoco is about 2 140 km long. Not all books agree on this number, because the upper streams in the mountains are hard to measure. It is in any case one of the largest rivers of South America.
Which country does the Orinoco flow through?
Where does the Orinoco flow into?
The Orinoco reaches the Atlantic Ocean through its delta. There the river splits into hundreds of arms and channels between swampy islands. Boats are often the only way to travel in that watery maze.
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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