ABOUT THE SARISARIÑAMA

The Tepuis are comprised by upwards of a hundred flat-topped mountains located in the Amazonas and Bolivar States, in the south of Venezuela. They cover approximately 500,000 km2, and their formation goes back to around 400 million years ago, a time at which Africa and America still formed a single continent.

Immortalized in the main scene of the dinosaur thriller “The Lost World”, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tepuis are a hot destination for present-day eco-tourists, despite their being subject to strict wilderness protection laws. However, it is so difficult to reach these mountains that most of them have remained nearly untouched by humankind.

The Sarisariñama Tepui is located in one of the most pristine areas in the Venezuelan Amazon, and along with two other mountains forms the Jaua-Sarisariñama National Park.

The Sarisariñama has at its top five “mantles of subsidence” - this scientific term designates a very big and deep opening. The most breathtaking, due to its size, is the “Mayor” mantle located at the north of the Tepui. Its vertical drop amounts to as much as 350 meters from the southeast border to the bottom; the diameter of the mouth is 350 meters, and the diameter at the bottom is 502 meters. These dimensions make it the largest in terms of absolute volume and the fourth most deep worldwide. The mantles were first discovered in 1964, and the “Mayor” was explored in 1976 during an expedition conducted by Venezuelan scientist and researcher Charles Brewer Carías.

Nobody yet knows exactly how these mysterious holes came to be.  One of the best-known scientific hypotheses is that they formed due to the process of erosion caused by subterranean rivers that ran through the Tepui, leading to cave-ins at specific points on the mountain’s flat top.