🇻🇪 Venezuela · Guayana and La Gran Sabana
La Gran Sabana is one of the most extraordinary regions in Venezuela: a vast tableland of rolling savanna, rivers, waterfalls and, above all, tepuis —the giant flat-topped mountains with vertical walls that inspired Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World'. It spreads across the southeast of Bolívar state, inside Canaima National Park, a World Heritage Site, in the heart of the Guiana Shield.
This is the land of the Indigenous Pemón people, of landscapes that look like another planet: tepuis vanishing into cloud, rivers stained dark by tannin running over beds of jasper, waterfalls at the roadside and endless savanna horizons. Highway 10, the Troncal 10, which crosses the region towards the Brazilian border, opens up many of its treasures.
This guide covers the essentials of La Gran Sabana: its tepuis and waterfalls, Pemón culture, how to travel the highway, which trips to make (Salto Kamá, Quebrada de Jaspe, Roraima, Kavac), indicative prices for tours and trekking, where to stay and eat, and how to get around this magical territory in Venezuela's south.
La Gran Sabana is a tableland of the Guiana Shield, one of the oldest geological formations on the planet, inhabited from ancient times by the Pemón people. It is protected within Canaima National Park, created in 1962 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Venezuela's largest state: home of the tepuis and Angel Falls — the world's tallest waterfall — of La Gran Sabana and the Pemón people, of Bolívar's Angostura Address, of Orinoco gold, of the Guri dam and the heavy industry of Ciudad Guayana.
Read the history of Bolívar →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
La Gran Sabana sits on the Guiana Shield, one of the oldest geological formations on the planet, with rocks that rank among the oldest on Earth, up to almost two billion years old. That ancient sandstone base gave rise, after ages of erosion, to a unique landscape: a rolling tableland of savanna out of which the tepuis rise like islands of stone.
The tepuis are enormous flat-topped plateaus with vertical walls, the remains of a vast covering of rock (the Roraima Formation) that erosion wore away over millions of years, leaving only these isolated towers standing. Their name comes from the Pemón language and means, roughly, 'mountain' or 'house of the gods'. Their summits, cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years, hold singular ecosystems with numerous endemic species that evolved separately, a kind of 'islands in the sky'.
That combination of extreme geology, unique biodiversity and overwhelming scenery made the region famous: Roraima and its neighbors gave Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the idea for his novel 'The Lost World' (1912), which imagined dinosaurs surviving on one of these unreachable plateaus. The geological reality of La Gran Sabana is, in its way, every bit as astonishing as the fiction.
La Gran Sabana is the ancestral territory of the Pemón, a Carib-speaking Indigenous people who have lived in this region for centuries, traditionally organized in small settlements scattered across the savanna and living from shifting conuco cultivation (mainly bitter cassava, grown in cleared forest plots), hunting and fishing. The Pemón are divided into several subgroups (Arekuna, Taurepán, Kamarakoto), with dialect variations, but they share a language, a worldview and a territory.
The Pemón worldview explains the landscape through stories: many features —tepuis, waterfalls, rivers— have their own myth, often involving Makunaima, a central figure in Pemón mythology associated with the creation of the world. The tepuis are considered sacred places, the dwellings of spirits (mawari), and that connection to the land makes the Pemón the natural guardians of La Gran Sabana: their knowledge of the territory is indispensable for traveling it, and the climb up Roraima, expeditions to remote waterfalls or trips to places like Kavac all require Pemón guides.
As tourism developed from the mid-20th century, many Pemón communities came to run camps, guesthouses and guiding services, which are both a livelihood and a way of sharing their culture. Respecting their rules, customs and sacred places, and supporting their enterprises, is an essential part of visiting the region responsibly.
Unlike other regions of Venezuela, La Gran Sabana stayed largely outside Spanish colonization for centuries, protected by its remoteness, its broken terrain and the resistance of the Indigenous peoples of Guayana. Systematic contact with the Western world came only in the 19th century and, above all, at the start of the 20th, through explorers, Capuchin missionaries and the rubber boom, which drew prospectors south into Bolívar in search of balatá and other natural gums from the forest.
That contact brought tension and also diseases against which the Pemón had no defenses, along with the imposition of religious missions bent on 'civilizing' and evangelizing the communities. At the same time, explorers such as the Briton Everard im Thurn (the first Westerner documented to have climbed Roraima, in 1884) and later scientific expeditions began to make these extraordinary landscapes known internationally, feeding the imagination that Conan Doyle would later draw on.
The real turning point in opening up the region came in the 20th century with the building of Highway 10, the Troncal 10, linking El Dorado with Santa Elena de Uairén and the Brazilian border, completed in successive stretches between the 1970s and the 1990s. That road transformed access to La Gran Sabana completely, turning a journey that had required expeditions lasting days into a drive of a few hours.
La Gran Sabana forms part of Canaima National Park, one of the largest and most emblematic in Venezuela, created in 1962 and later extended. Covering some three million hectares, it is the country's second-largest national park and one of the biggest in the world; it takes in much of southeastern Bolívar state and includes not only La Gran Sabana but also the Canaima lagoon area and Angel Falls, the highest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth, which drops from Auyantepui.
In 1994, UNESCO added Canaima National Park to the World Heritage list, recognizing its exceptional natural value: its tepuis, its unique geological landscapes, its biodiversity and its formations of great beauty. It's one of the continent's great protected natural treasures and holds more than a hundred separate tepuis, the largest concentration of this kind of formation anywhere in the world.
Protecting this vast territory aims to preserve both its fragile ecosystems —especially those on the tepui summits, extremely sensitive and desperately slow to recover from any disturbance— and the way of life of the Pemón communities who live there. Nature tourism, well managed and led by the Pemón, coexists with the mission of conserving one of the most extraordinary landscapes on the planet.
Since Highway 10 opened, La Gran Sabana has established itself as one of South America's great nature and adventure destinations. Santa Elena de Uairén, founded in 1931 as a small border post, grew into the region's base town, with tour operators, guesthouses and agencies running everything from day trips to multi-day expeditions up Roraima.
The climb up Mount Roraima, popularized internationally from the late 20th century, became one of the most sought-after treks on the continent, drawing travelers from around the world prepared to walk for 6 to 8 days to reach a summit of almost 2,800 meters and explore its lunar landscape of unique rock formations, known as the 'Valley of the Crystals' and the 'Jacuzzi'.
Venezuela's economic and political swings over recent decades badly affected the flow of international tourists to the region, though La Gran Sabana goes on receiving visitors, Venezuelan and foreign alike, drawn by a landscape that remains, despite everything, one of the most extraordinary and best preserved in South America.