The First European Expedition To Reach The Summit

European explorers and naturalists began hearing about the tepuis from the early centuries of contact with Indigenous peoples of the region.

Paintings and descriptions of the Gran Sabana’s distinctive flat-topped mountains made their way into European geographical literature over the centuries, but the summits themselves remained unvisited by European expeditions for a long time.

The difficulty was not just the physical challenge of ascending the cliffs — it was the practical challenge of reaching the mountain at all, through difficult lowland terrain, across rivers, and into a region where the existing transport infrastructure was almost entirely absent.

Roraima’s extreme summit — that flat plateau above the cliffs — was first documented as having been reached by a European expedition in 1884.