Mount Roraima is the most famous of South America’s tepuis, the flat-topped table mountains of the Guiana Highlands. Its summit plateau rises to 2,810 metres (9,220 ft), ringed by sheer cliffs up to about 1,000 metres high, and it marks the point where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet.

Mount Roraima’s flat summit and sheer cliffs in South America
A flat-topped tepui rising above the clouds in the Roraima region

Mount Roraima at a glance

  • Highest point: 2,810 m (9,220 ft), on the southern edge of the plateau in Venezuela. Guyana’s high point on the mountain reaches 2,772 m.
  • Summit plateau: about 33 to 50 km² (13 to 19 sq mi), more than 10 km long and up to 5 km wide.
  • Tripoint: the borders of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela meet on the plateau at about 2,734 m. Venezuela holds about 85 percent of the mountain, Guyana about 10 percent and Brazil about 5 percent.
  • Name: in the Pemón language, “roroi” means blue-green and “ma” means great.

What is a tepui? Geology of the table mountains

Tepuis are sandstone plateaus with near-vertical walls and almost flat tops. Roraima’s sandstone dates from the Proterozoic, roughly 1.7 to 2 billion years ago, and is about 98 percent silica. Water has shaped the summit into a “pseudo-karst” landscape riddled with extensive caves.

On the Venezuelan side, Roraima lies in Canaima National Park, created in 1962 and listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1994. The park covers about 30,000 km², and around 65 percent of it is tepui plateau. Its most famous waterfall, Angel Falls, drops 979 metres from Auyán-tepui and is the highest in the world.

Clouds around the cliffs of a tepui in the Roraima region

Plants and animals of the summit

High above the surrounding savanna, the summit has a cool, wet climate of its own, with average temperatures of about 20 to 22 °C and more than 1,500 mm of rain a year. Many of its species are found nowhere else, including:

  • the Roraima marsh pitcher plant (Heliamphora nutans);
  • the Gran Sabana sundew (Drosera felix) and Roraima bladderwort (Utricularia quelchii), both carnivorous;
  • the Roraima “azalea” (Bejaria imthurnii);
  • the Roraima toad (Oreophrynella quelchii).

The Pemón and the first recorded ascent

The Pemón, an Indigenous people of the Carib language family, live in the Gran Sabana and have a close relationship with the tepuis, which they regard as the home of Mawari spirits. They may well have climbed Roraima long before outsiders arrived.

The first recorded ascent was made on 18 December 1884 by Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins, with help from Pemón guides. Im Thurn’s name lives on in the summit “azalea”, Bejaria imthurnii.

Mount Roraima tepui landscape on the Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana border

Trekking Mount Roraima

Roraima is one of only two flat-topped mountains in Canaima National Park that hikers can climb. The usual trek takes three to five days: a night at a base camp near 2,000 m, a night on the summit, and two days to descend. No technical climbing skills are needed, but streams can be hard to cross after heavy rain, and numbers are limited to about 200 people a month.

Check the FCDO advice for Venezuela before planning: in 2026 it advised against all travel to some border areas, including zones near Brazil and Guyana, and against all but essential travel to the rest of the country.

For more extraordinary landscapes, see our Catatumbo lightning article on Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo storms, and Meteora, the rock pillars and monasteries of Thessaly in Greece.