Waterfall Records by Metric: Height, Width and Flow

The answer to which waterfall is tallest depends on what you count. Guinness World Records lists Angel Falls in Venezuela at 979 m total drop, with a longest single drop of 807 m. The World Waterfall Database, which Guinness itself cites for its flow records, puts Angel Falls 14th on its overall-height list at 807 m and puts Tugela Falls in South Africa first at 948 m. Neither source is wrong. They count different things, and width and flow work the same way. So every figure on this page is written the same way: value, metric, source, list, and the day we read it.

We earn a commission when you book a tour through the links on this site, at no extra cost to you. It does not change the numbers. Three of the waterfalls below are in our catalog: Victoria Falls, Niagara Falls and Iguazú Falls. The record holders for height, width and flow are not.

Start with Angel Falls, because it shows the problem. Guinness gives the total drop as 979 m and the longest single drop as 807 m, and says the falls were last surveyed in 1949, on a National Geographic expedition. It adds that there is now some debate over whether all 979 m belong to a single waterfall. If the true figure is only the first 807-meter drop, Guinness says, the multi-drop 948-meter Tugela Falls would be the tallest overall.

The database's own Tugela page goes further. It calls it extremely likely that Tugela is still the tallest recorded, and says the measurement often credited to Angel Falls was probably taken from nearly 2 kilometers away. It also reports that a Czech team measured 983 m at Tugela in 2016 from more than a kilometer off, and it calls that figure not accurate. The same page says Tugela is commonly described as five leaps and may have as many as seven or eight, so even the count of steps is open.

Three lists, three answers. The database's overall-height list counts a waterfall of any kind, however many tiers it has. Its single-drop list counts only the tallest single step, and its free-falling list counts only the part where water leaves the rock. Angel Falls is 14th on the first and 1st on the second, at the same 807 m. The Swiss Mattenbachfälle, at 930 m, is second on the overall list. Few people have heard of it, and it sits ahead of Angel Falls.

Khone Phapheng Falls on the Mekong in southern Laos holds the top entry on the database width list: 10,783 m average width. The database's Khone page describes a series of falls and rapids that stretch about 10 kilometers from one edge to the other, rates the form as segmented rapids, and gives a maximum width of 12,954 m. That is not a curtain of water. It is a field of channels measured together, a different object from a single wall of falling water.

Victoria Falls is not first on any width list we read. It is 11th on the database's. Not close. UNESCO makes a narrower claim, the largest curtain of falling water in the world, and the Zambia Tourism portal explains the label as width and height combined. So Victoria Falls is a curtain record and not a width record. The same UNESCO text puts the falls at up to 500 million liters per minute, which is about 8,300 m³/s (our conversion), and Iguazú as a semicircle 2,700 meters across and 80 m high. Our guide to which side of a border waterfall to visit reads what the operators on each bank publish about those two.

Flow is the least stable number of all. The database's list of average volume, which leaves out falls lost to dams, starts with Inga Falls on the Congo at 25,768 m³/s. Livingstone Falls on the same river follows at 25,060, and Wagenia Falls on the Lualaba at 16,990. Khone is fourth at 11,610. Niagara is seventh at 2,407, Iguazú ninth at 1,746 and Victoria Falls twelfth at 1,088. Guinness also gives Inga at 25,768 m³/s, and adds that there is some debate over whether Inga is a true waterfall or a series of rapids.

Read the label. The database's entries say average high volume, with a count of months attached: 11 for Khone, 8 for Victoria Falls. That is an average over the high-flow months, not over the year. It explains a strange pairing. The database's Victoria Falls page gives 1,088 m³/s for the 8 high months and 42 m³/s for the other 4, and weighting those two by their months gives a yearly mean near 740 m³/s (our arithmetic). The Zambezi River Authority, in its river flow bulletin, gives the long-term mean annual flow at the falls as 1,100 m³/s. Both cannot describe the same river over the same years. The database lists the source as unknown, and the page was last updated on 19 March 2017. We cannot say which is off, so each is used only with its label.

A reading is not a record, and a record is not an average. At Iguazú, the Brazilian concessionaire reported 11.8 million liters per second on 12 October 2026, which is 11,800 m³/s and almost seven times the database's 1,746. Its later bulletin gives a historical mean of 1.5 million liters per second, or 1,500 m³/s, much closer to the database. On the Zambezi, the same ZRA bulletin lists a highest recorded flow of 10,000 m³/s in March 1958. Our guide to when a waterfall has water explains why one number cannot stand for a whole year.

The National Ocean Service says one lies beneath the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland, with a downward flow estimated at over 123 million cubic feet per second, about 3.5 million m³/s (our conversion). NOAA describes cold, dense water from the Nordic Seas sinking below warmer water from the Irminger Sea and pouring over a step in the ocean floor. Guinness agrees on the name, says the cataract was discovered in 1989 and states that no terrestrial waterfall is as high.

NOAA's own description has a flaw. The page contradicts itself. It calls the drop nearly two miles, and its own two depths make it a mile and a half. The agency gives both numbers on one page and does not reconcile them. Nobody visits this one, and no tour sells it.

Two European operators claim a title, and the titles are different. The Rhine Falls site calls the falls Europe's largest waterfall and gives a width of 150 m, while the Vatnajökull National Park page for Dettifoss in Iceland says it is the most powerful waterfall in Europe and gives 44 to 45 m high and about 100 m wide. Both are claims.

The Swiss site also shows a live discharge reading from the federal environment office beside its claim. The Icelandic page, as far as we could read it, carries no flow figure. Largest and most powerful are not the same measure, and a site can pick the one it wins. We report both, each with the metric it uses. Dettifoss is on our North Iceland page.

Five questions sort most of the confusion. Ask them in this order.

A record without its metric is a slogan. Before you repeat a number, write down which measure, which list and which year it belongs to.

None of this makes the records meaningless. It makes them dated claims. If you are choosing a waterfall to visit, size is a poor guide to the visit, and how to choose a waterfall tour is a better place to start, and our guide to how waterfalls form covers what shapes the falls behind the numbers. Words used in this guide, such as cataract, plunge and segmented, are defined in our glossary of waterfall types, and short answers to the questions people ask most are in the waterfall FAQ.