Monte Roraima

Monte Roraima National Park was created in 1989 at the northern tip of Roraima state and protects the Brazilian flank of Mount Roraima, the best-known tepui in South America, whose summit marks the exact point where the borders of Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana meet.

Tepuis are sandstone plateaux of Precambrian origin, remnants of a very ancient sedimentary cover that erosion has been dismantling over hundreds of millions of years until only isolated blocks with vertical walls up to a thousand metres high were left. Roraima rises above the savannah of the Gran Sabana like an island in the sky, and its summit, rocky-floored, permanently damp and swept by fog, holds an ecosystem of its own.

That prolonged isolation has produced extremely high endemism: carnivorous plants adapted to nutrient-free soils, bromeliads and orchids found nowhere else, and amphibians such as the small Roraima black toad, which exists in no other place. The plateau inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, and that imagery remains attached to the place. On the Brazilian side, the park overlaps the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory, home of the Ingarikó people, which has required a model of shared management; the usual ascent route up the tepui, by contrast, starts from the Venezuelan side.