🇪🇨 Ecuador · Amazon (Oriente)
The San Rafael Waterfall no longer exists. On 2 February 2020, the highest waterfall in Ecuador —some 150 meters of drop on the Coca river, on the border of Napo and Sucumbíos, inside Cayambe-Coca National Park— disappeared within hours. A sinkhole opened behind the lip of volcanic rock that held up the waterfall, the river dropped and shifted course, and the giant jet of water that had fallen in the middle of the Andean-Amazonian forest for thousands of years went out for good. If you're planning to visit it, this is the honest information you need before you plan the trip.
What happened was not a passing episode: it was the start of a regressive erosion of the Coca river that keeps advancing upstream, and which since 2020 has destroyed bridges and oil pipelines (with oil spills in 2020 and 2024), wiped out more than 500 hectares of native forest and now threatens the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant. A 2024 scientific study linked the trigger to changes in the river's sediment transport after that dam was built. The trail and the viewpoint were closed to tourism for safety reasons, and the waterfall is considered permanently gone.
This guide tells you honestly what the San Rafael Waterfall was, what happened in 2020, why the falls can no longer be visited and what is left in the area today for anyone traveling the Quito–Lago Agrio road (E45): the active volcano El Reventador, the humid forest of Cayambe-Coca, the Papallacta hot springs and the Quijos valley. It is at once a lost Ecuadorian icon and a striking lesson in nature's power to transform and in the human impact on rivers.
For thousands of years, the San Rafael Waterfall was the highest in Ecuador: some 150 meters of drop on the Coca river, in Cayambe-Coca National Park, at the foot of the El Reventador volcano. On 2 February 2020, a sinkhole opened behind the lip of volcanic rock, the river dropped and the waterfall collapsed, disappearing within hours; the natural arch that remained came down a year later. What followed was a regressive erosion of the Coca river that keeps advancing upstream and has already destroyed bridges and oil pipelines, caused oil spills (2020 and 2024), wiped out hundreds of hectares of forest and threatens the Coca Codo Sinclair dam. Scientific studies have linked the process to changes in the river's sediment transport after that hydroelectric plant was built in 2016. The full version is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Gateway to the Ecuadorian Amazon: land of the Amazonian Kichwa people and of the legendary «Land of Cinnamon», the old Quijos Governorship where Jumandy led the great rebellion of 1578, with Tena as the rafting capital, the Sumaco volcano and the fine aroma cacao of the foothill rainforest.
Read the history of Napo →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On 2 February 2020, anyone walking the forest along the Coca river noticed something impossible: the roar had stopped. The San Rafael Waterfall, a jet of some 150 meters that for thousands of years had plunged into the middle of the Andean Amazon and that was the highest waterfall in Ecuador, had disappeared overnight. Where a column of water wrapped in vapor once thundered, there was a gash cut into the rock, three straggling threads of water and silence. There had been no earthquake and no eruption: the river itself had swallowed its waterfall.
San Rafael stood on the Coca river, on the border of the provinces of Napo and Sucumbíos, inside Cayambe-Coca National Park, at the foot of the active El Reventador volcano and near the Sumaco massif, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The water of the Coca, fed by meltwater and rain from the eastern cordillera, fell into a gorge of volcanic rock surrounded by humid forest, and the visit —a cloud-forest walk ending at the viewpoint, facing the roar and the cloud of spray— was one of the most impressive natural experiences in the country.
For decades, San Rafael was one of the great icons of the Ecuadorian Oriente: it appeared in guidebooks and tourism campaigns, received between 15,000 and 20,000 visitors a year and was an obligatory stop on the Quito–Lago Agrio road on the way to the Amazon. Its sudden disappearance turned it, from one day to the next, into a global case study in how a landscape that seemed eternal can be erased in a matter of hours.
To understand San Rafael you have to understand the Coca river. This tributary of the Napo rises in the páramo and snowfields of the eastern cordillera, in the Cayambe area, and drops hard toward the Amazon, forcing itself into deep gorges as it loses altitude. It's a young river, steep and with enormous erosive energy, which for millennia has sculpted the relief it runs through.
The waterfall formed exactly where the Coca crossed a step of hard rock associated with old lava flows from the El Reventador volcano, one of the most active in Ecuador. El Reventador, which produced a major eruption in 2002 whose ash reached Quito, has shaped this whole region with its flows and volcanic deposits. The San Rafael falls were, to a large extent, a child of that geology: the water plunged when it reached the edge of that resistant rock.
That same geologically dynamic character —a torrential river over volcanic terrain in constant transformation— explains why a landscape that seemed eternal could change overnight. The area is a living laboratory of natural processes: volcanism, fluvial erosion and the lush life of the Andean-Amazonian transition forest.
What happened on 2 February 2020 was as spectacular as it was devastating. Behind the lip of hard rock —an old lava 'dyke' from El Reventador over which the water plunged— an enormous sinkhole opened in the bed of the Coca river. The river slipped through that hole and found a new underground path, lower and more direct, leaving the waterfall without its drop: the single 150-meter jet broke into three lesser falls and, within a few months, the Coca finished carving a new channel with a more gradual descent. The waterfall simply ceased to exist.
The collapse left a fleeting geological curiosity: as the river sank beneath it, the layer of hard rock was left above, forming a great arch or 'natural bridge' across the Coca, briefly one of the longest natural bridges in the world. But it was unstable: about a year later, that arch also came down, leaving an open gorge where the falls had been. By the end of 2021, the San Rafael Waterfall had ceased to exist entirely.
The mechanism behind all this is regressive (or headward) erosion: having lost its base of resistant rock, the river began cutting backward, upstream, retreating its own escarpment at an astonishing rate. Federal scientists from the United States (USGS) and from NASA, along with Ecuadorian specialists, studied the phenomenon for its rarity. A sinkhole of this kind, in such a torrential river and over volcanic terrain, produced a landscape transformation that would normally take centuries and that here happened in months.
The collapse of San Rafael was not the end of the story but the beginning of a disaster that is still going on. The regressive erosion of the Coca river kept climbing upstream at an astonishing rate, devouring meters of riverbed year after year. As early as 7 April 2020, barely two months after the waterfall disappeared, the retreat of the escarpment broke the pipelines of the Trans-Ecuadorian Pipeline System (SOTE) and the Heavy Crude Pipeline (OCP), causing a serious oil spill that contaminated the Coca river and affected Kichwa communities downstream. Another spill happened in March 2024.
The damage figures are alarming. According to satellite analysis, between June 2020 and early 2024 —barely three and a half years— the erosion wiped out more than 500 hectares of native forest along the channel, with the eroded area growing by more than 900 % in four years. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of sediment are estimated to have migrated downstream. The process also brought down bridges (such as one over the Marker river, a tributary of the Coca, in February 2023) and directly threatens the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, the largest in the country, whose intakes were left dangerously exposed to the advancing escarpment. The state has had to invest in costly protection works and permanent monitoring.
For tourism, the loss meant the end of one of the great natural attractions of the Oriente. The trail and the viewpoint were closed off for safety, and the area —geologically unstable— stopped receiving visitors to the falls. What remains is a site for studying geological transformation, rather than a postcard destination.
The disappearance of San Rafael became, beyond tourism, an uncomfortable mirror. It was one of the first times the Ecuadorian public saw so starkly how a major infrastructure project can end up entangled with an environmental disaster of regional scale. The debate over the Coca Codo Sinclair plant —a dam already questioned for technical faults and for corruption investigations into its construction— has been marked forever by the image of the waterfall gone silent downstream.
For scientists, San Rafael became an exceptional laboratory. Geologists, engineers and agencies such as the USGS and NASA studied it as a rare case of channel capture and headward erosion at extreme speed, useful for understanding how young rivers on volcanic terrain respond when their sediment balance is disturbed. The before-and-after satellite images became study material worldwide.
Today, anyone traveling the Quito–Lago Agrio road doesn't find the great waterfall, but does find a landscape that is still alive: the humid forest of Cayambe-Coca, the imposing El Reventador volcano and the memory of a waterfall that was, for thousands of years, the highest in Ecuador. San Rafael remains a powerful reminder of two things at once: the transforming force of Amazonian rivers and the responsibility to plan major works prudently in geologically active basins. It is, perhaps, the most valuable lesson its fall left behind.