Venezuela Main Attractions

Caribbean Coasts, cattle ranching and wild rivers...

Los Roques: Venezuela’s Caribbean coast has miles of beautiful beaches but the truly idyllic stretches and best accommodation are to be found in the archipelago of Los Roques.  A marine national park, Los Roques offers excellent swimming, snorkelling and diving among coral reefs, to spot sea turtles, barracuda, dolphins and sharks. Hotels tend to be simple posadas which are very much in keeping with the laid-back barefoot style of the places they’re in.

Los Llanos: In the heart of the country, the Llanos is somewhere between the pampas of Argentina and the wetlands of Brazil. Cowboy territory, this huge region of seasonally flooded plains is also home to a staggering quantity of birds, reptiles, fish and mammals, including species as diverse as the scarlet ibis, armadillo, manatee or ocelot.

Stay on a ranch and enjoy a safari-like experience, with excursions by day and night led by tracker-guides in boats or by road. Learn something of the culture of the llaneros too; these tough people of the land relive their ancestors’ stories through folklore and song and if you’re lucky, you’ll catch something of both around a campfire.

Orinoco Delta: As the huge Orinoco River reaches the Atlantic Ocean, it passes through a maze of creeks and mangroves in this vast delta deep in the jungle. Floating gently through the palms and lilies in a canoe is a wonderfully tranquil experience, and there is plenty of bird and animal life here too. However, the largest attraction of this beautiful region is the chance to observe and meet the people of the Warao Indian communities who live here in stilt houses over the water, continuing unchanged a lifestyle that dates back several thousand years.

Your own accommodation will be in simple but delightful cabañas, joined together by raised wooden walkways, in the style of the Warao settlements.

Angel Falls: The world’s highest ‘single drop’ waterfall belongs to southeast Venezuela, and beautiful Canaima National Park. The waters plunge nearly one kilometre from craggy mountain cliffs in this rainforest setting so hidden and so remote that the falls were only discovered in the 1930s.

You can choose to see them by flying above them in a light aircraft, or by venturing upriver by canoe as far as possible and then walking to the base of the falls from there.  Take a swim in the pool at the base of the falls if you dare – it’s certainly exhilarating and will beat the hell out of any power shower you’ve ever experienced. Accommodation in this area is in basic lodges or you can even spend the night in a hammock at the ‘base camp’.  

Mount Roraima: In a landscape dominated by huge tepuis (table-top mountains), Roraima is the most dominant of them all. The awe-inspiring scenery of the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela is said to have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write ‘The Lost World’ and it is very easy to see why.

Mount Roraima – spanning the border with Brazil and Guyana too – is higher by some way than Cape Town’s Table Mountain, and so high that the ecosystem on its flat summit is entirely different from the one at its base.  A trek to the top can be arranged, and usually takes around a week.