Ask which waterfall is the tallest and almost everyone answers Angel Falls, so it is worth saying at the outset that this countdown does not. The figure that made Angel famous, 979 m, comes from a 1949 National Geographic survey that ran from the top of Auyán-tepui to the bank of the Río Caroní, roughly two kilometres downstream of the falls. Measure the waterfall by itself and Angel is 807 m, which is twelfth here. Every entry is ranked the same way, on the World Waterfall Database's total-height standard — crest of the uppermost tier to the base of the lowermost, counting the stream between tiers — from 948 m down to 783 m across eight countries. All fifteen still flow, which costs the list Norway's 773 m Mongefossen, taken for hydroelectricity in 1977, along with every fall drowned behind a dam.
15 Tallest Waterfalls in the World (2026)
The record The tallest waterfall in the world is Tugela Falls, in South Africa — 948 m (3,110 ft), total height. Source: World Waterfall Database. Verified .
Tallest Waterfalls in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World’s Tallest Waterfalls
- The world’s tallest waterfall and its longest single drop are two different falls — Tugela Falls leads on total height, while Angel Falls holds the record for the longest uninterrupted plunge at 807 m.
- The 979 m usually quoted for Angel Falls measures a mountain, not a waterfall — the 1949 National Geographic survey ran from the top of Auyán-tepui to the bank of the Río Caroní, about two kilometres downstream of the falls.
- Norway and the United States hold four entries each, more than any other country — Norway’s from the fjord walls of Sunndalen and Aurland, America’s from the sea cliffs of Hawaiʻi and one lone glacier stream in the North Cascades.
- Europe’s tallest waterfall was only measured properly in 2020, when a canyoning team made the first full rope descent of Mattenbachfälle and found it was some 90 m taller than the published estimate.
- The most precisely measured fall on this list is in Peru — Yumbilla Falls was laser-surveyed by Peru’s national mapping agency at 895.4 m, while most of the others rest on topographic maps.
- The tallest waterfall on Earth drains a basin of about three square kilometres — Tugela runs on snowmelt and storms rather than a steady river, and can thin to almost nothing in a dry spell.
1. Tugela Falls
At 948 m, Tugela Falls drains a stream you could step across. The Tugela rises in a basin of barely three square kilometres on top of the Drakensberg escarpment, then goes over the rim of the Amphitheatre — the great curved cliff that gives this stretch of the range its name — and falls in five distinct free-leaping tiers, the largest of them about 411 m on its own. The name is a phonetic spelling of the Zulu Thukela, meaning sudden, or startling.
Because the catchment is so small and sits above 3,000 m, the falls run on snowmelt and summer storms rather than a steady river, and can thin to almost nothing in a dry spell. Its place at the top of this list is not uncontested: a Czech expedition measured 983 m in 2016, but the reading was taken more than a kilometre from the base of the falls and the World Waterfall Database does not accept it. The 948 m figure stands, and on a consistent measure it is the tallest anywhere.
2. Mattenbachfälle
At 930 m, Mattenbachfälle is the tallest waterfall in Europe, and almost nobody has heard of it. It comes down the eastern wall of the Lauterbrunnen valley in the Bernese Oberland — the same valley as the far more celebrated Staubbach — in a series of tiers that no single viewpoint takes in at once, which is a large part of why it went uncounted for so long.
Its height was an estimate of about 840 m until 2020, when the Vertical Water Canyoning Team made the first full descent of the fall by rope and measured it at roughly 930 m. The Mattenbach itself drains less than a square kilometre, so the flow depends entirely on snowmelt and rain and can fade to a trickle in a dry summer. Most published rankings have not caught up with the resurvey and still carry the older number.
3. Tres Hermanas Falls
At 914 m, Tres Hermanas Falls takes its name — the Three Sisters — from the great leaps that make up its descent. It drops off a jungle-covered plateau in Otishi National Park, in the stretch of the Peruvian Andes that breaks down into Amazon headwaters, and the top two leaps are close to equal at roughly 183 m each before the stream keeps falling toward the Río Cutevirini below.
This is one of the harder entries to pin down. The falls sit in dense forest with no road and no viewpoint, and the World Waterfall Database treats the height as credible rather than surveyed, noting that elevation profiles support the 914 m figure without anyone having measured it on the ground. It lies inside Otishi National Park, established in 2003 in part to protect natural features of exactly this kind.
4. Oloʻupena Falls
At 900 m, Oloʻupena Falls is the tallest waterfall in the United States, and it pours straight into the sea. It runs down the north face of Molokaʻi, a wall of green cliffs that ranks among the tallest sea cliffs on Earth, in a chain of horsetail leaps that never gathers into a single plunge — more a white thread stitched down the rock than a curtain of water.
There is no trail to it and no overlook above it. The cliffs run unbroken for miles, so the only practical way to see the fall is from the water, on a boat or a sea kayak along the north coast, or from the air. The drainage feeding it is tiny, but the windward side of Molokaʻi collects rain more or less continuously, so unlike most very tall falls it is rarely dry.
5. Yumbilla Falls
At 896 m, Yumbilla Falls has the best-documented height on this list: Peru's Instituto Geográfico Nacional put a laser survey on it and returned 895.4 m, a precision almost none of these falls can claim. It descends in a run of consecutive horsetails and plunges off the northern wall of the same cloud-forest plateau that produces the better-known Gocta, above the village of Cuispes in the Amazonas region.
That survey is what put Yumbilla on the map, and the plateau around it holds several more falls of comparable stature — Chinata and Pabellón among them — all well over 400 m. Flow is modest, so what you get is height rather than force: a thin white line dropping through cloud forest for the better part of a kilometre. It sits a few miles on from Gocta, which takes most of the region's visitors.
6. Skorga
At 875 m, Skorga is the taller of the two great waterfalls of Sunndalen, and the one nobody photographs. It comes off the same enormous valley wall as its celebrated neighbour Vinnufossen, about two kilometres away, fed by a basin holding two small lakes and meltwater from the Kald glacier, and it beats Vinnufossen by some thirty metres.
Sunndalen is a glacially over-deepened valley in Møre og Romsdal whose sides carry dozens of tall falls, and Skorga is the longest of them. It runs as an extended horsetail rather than a free leap, hugging the rock for most of its descent, which is part of why it reads as less dramatic than its shorter neighbour and gets left off rankings that Vinnufossen makes. Flow peaks with the summer melt and drops away sharply once the snow above has gone.
7. Vinnufossen
At 845 m, Vinnufossen is the best known of the great Norwegian waterfalls and the easiest of the very tall ones to actually see, dropping within sight of the road up Sunndalen above the town of Sunndalsøra. The water comes off the Vinnu glacier, shoots out of a narrow cleft at the top of the valley wall and falls sheer for about 155 m before striking a shelf, then veils down the rock for another 575 m or so, with a final cascade of roughly 92 m at the foot.
That three-stage structure is why it looks the way it does from below: a bright ribbon that seems to hang off the skyline and then spread across the whole face of the mountain. It runs heaviest in early summer when the glacier is melting hardest and thins considerably by autumn. Its neighbour Skorga, two kilometres up the valley, is in fact the taller of the pair.
8. Puʻukaʻoku Falls
At 840 m, Puʻukaʻoku Falls is the second of Molokaʻi's great sea-cliff waterfalls, dropping down the same wall of green rock about a kilometre east of Oloʻupena. It is recorded at 2,756 ft against James Bruce Falls at 2,755 ft — a single foot apart in the underlying data, which is why the two share a height of 840 m here and are separated only by that original figure.
Like its neighbours it has no trail, no viewpoint and no gauge. What is known about it comes from topographic mapping and from the boats and helicopters that work the north coast in summer, when the sea is calm enough to come in close. The cliffs here rise more or less straight out of the water, so the fall has no run-out at the bottom: it simply arrives at the ocean.
9. James Bruce Falls
At 840 m, James Bruce Falls is the tallest waterfall in North America, and it is reached by boat or floatplane or not at all. It drops into Princess Louisa Inlet, a steep-sided arm off British Columbia's Jervis Inlet where several dozen waterfalls come down the surrounding walls; James Bruce is simply the longest of them.
It is fed by a small remnant glacier sitting above 1,500 m, which keeps a thread of water running through the year even though the volume is never more than modest. For more than half its descent it runs inside a narrow cleft in the rock, so from the water below you cannot take in the whole thing at once — the upper section stays hidden. It ties with Puʻukaʻoku Falls at 840 m and sits behind it here by a single foot in the source survey.
10. Browne Falls
At 836 m, Browne Falls is the tallest waterfall in New Zealand, and it starts at a lake. Lake Browne sits 836 m above Doubtful Sound in Fiordland, and its outlet runs down the mountainside to the sea as a long twisting cascade rather than a clean leap, with a possible single drop of a couple of hundred metres near the top.
Its height was widely published as about 619 m until topographic maps made clear that the figure left out part of the descent — the water aerates essentially from the moment it leaves the lake and does not stop until it reaches salt water. Doubtful Sound gets a fraction of the traffic Milford does, so the falls are usually seen from a boat on an empty fiord, and they run hardest after rain, which in Fiordland is most of the time.
11. Kjerrskredfossen
At 831 m, Kjerrskredfossen drops into Nærøydalen, the glacier-cut valley above Gudvangen at the head of the Nærøyfjord in western Norway. It falls as two streams side by side, fed by a small lake and by snowmelt off the plateau, alternating between free plunges and horsetail sections down a wall that carries dozens of other falls.
It stands just southwest of the better-known Kjelfossen and is the taller of the two, though it draws a fraction of the attention. The World Waterfall Database surveyed it on the ground in 2011 and came away noting that the creek carried considerably more water than expected and that the scale of the thing did not come across in photographs. It runs strongly with the spring melt and after sustained rain, and quietens in a settled summer.
12. Angel Falls
At 807 m, Angel Falls is the tallest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth — its single plunge is far longer than any other — and it sits twelfth here only because this list ranks total height rather than the longest leap. The water leaves the Río Gauja on top of Auyán-tepui, disappears into a sinkhole at the edge of the plateau and bursts out of the cliff face some 30 to 40 m below the rim, then falls free for the better part of a kilometre. It drops so far that in light flow it reaches the canyon floor as mist rather than water, re-gathering into a river below.
The familiar figure of 979 m comes from a 1949 expedition financed by the journalist Ruth Robertson, whose survey ran from the top of the tepui to the bank of the Río Caroní roughly two kilometres downstream — a measurement of the mountain rather than of the waterfall. On the standard applied to every other entry on this page, Angel measures 807 m. Its Pemón name is Kerepakupai Merú; the name the world uses comes from Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who put his aircraft down on the plateau above in 1933.
13. Storeskredfossen
At 800 m, Storeskredfossen is the least documented waterfall on this list. It falls on the Storskredgrovi, a small stream in Aurland in Vestland, in the same high country above the Nærøyfjord that produces Kjerrskredfossen a few kilometres to the south, and the longest single section of its descent is put at about 325 m.
There is no detailed survey of it, no trail, and very little written about it in any language — the World Waterfall Database confirms it exists and lists its height without publishing a description. That is not unusual in this corner of Norway: the plateau edges above the western fjords carry so many tall falls that individual ones go unnamed and unmeasured for decades. It is fed by snowmelt, so it is at its most convincing in late spring and can be reduced to a stain on the rock by August.
14. Waihilau Falls
At 792 m, Waihilau Falls hangs at the back of Waimanu Valley on the north coast of Hawaiʻi Island, one of several slender threads of water veiling down a vegetated headwall. The 792 m figure comes from USGS topographic mapping of the amphitheatre wall rather than from a survey of the water itself, which is a fair description of how most Hawaiian waterfall heights are arrived at.
Waimanu is one of the great amphitheatre valleys cut into the flank of the Kohala volcano, and reaching it means either a boat landing or the Muliwai Trail, a long and steep walk over from Waipiʻo. The difficulty of getting there is also the reason the valley stays as it is. Flow varies a great deal with rainfall on the windward slopes, and the fall can be a faint trace on the cliff in a dry stretch.
15. Colonial Creek Falls
At 783 m, Colonial Creek Falls is the tallest waterfall in the continental United States, and almost nobody sees it properly. It comes off the headwall above Thunder Arm on Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park, Washington, descending in thirteen distinct steps rather than one long fall, which is much of the reason it took so long for anyone to add up its height.
The water comes from a lake that has formed where the Colonial Glacier has drawn back, so it runs year-round rather than seasonally, though the stream itself is a modest one. The World Waterfall Database, which surveyed it on the ground, is blunt about the experience: it is not a spectacular waterfall by any measure other than height, and it looks best from a distance, where the whole drop from ridge to basin floor can be taken in at once.
FAQ: The Tallest Waterfalls in the World
What is the tallest waterfall in the world?
Tugela Falls in South Africa, at 948 m, falling in five free-leaping tiers off the Drakensberg escarpment. The title is contested because Angel Falls is far more often named, but the 979 m figure behind that claim measures the mountain above the falls rather than the waterfall itself.
Why is Angel Falls not first on this list?
Angel Falls comes to 979 m only if you measure from the top of Auyán-tepui down to the Río Caroní, about two kilometres downstream. The 1949 National Geographic survey behind that number did exactly that. Measured as a waterfall on its own, Angel is 807 m, which places it twelfth here.
What is the tallest waterfall with a single unbroken drop?
Angel Falls, at 807 m, and nothing else on Earth is close. The water bursts from the cliff face a little below the rim of Auyán-tepui and falls free for the better part of a kilometre, so far that in light flow it reaches the canyon floor as mist rather than water.
What is the difference between the tallest and the largest waterfall?
Tallest ranks by height; largest ranks by flow rate, the volume of water crossing the lip every second. The two measures produce almost entirely different lists, because the most powerful falls are broad, low cataracts on big rivers. Our ranking of the largest waterfalls in the world covers those.
Which country has the most of the world's tallest waterfalls?
Norway and the United States tie with four entries each. Norway's come off the fjord walls of Sunndalen and Aurland, while three of America's are on the sea cliffs of Molokaʻi and Hawaiʻi Island, with Colonial Creek Falls in Washington the tallest on the mainland.
Can you visit the world's tallest waterfalls?
Some of them, with effort. Vinnufossen is visible from the road up Sunndalen and Angel Falls is reached by light aircraft and river boat. Others have no practical access at all: the Molokaʻi falls are seen only from a boat or the air, and several of the Norwegian entries have no trail.
When is the best time to see them?
Most of these falls are snowmelt-fed, so they peak in late spring and early summer and fade by late summer. The Norwegian entries are strongest in June, Tugela runs with the southern-hemisphere summer storms, and the Hawaiian falls are the most reliable of all because the windward cliffs catch rain year-round.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.