The highway from the coast was flat and paved, lined with beige villages and the colorful political graffiti of the recent election. We convened in the tiny airport parking lot in Chiclayo, piled into one of the ubiquitous hired white Corollas that rattle around Peru and began to climb the Andes. Add a photographer from Lima and we would make a threesome. They paired me with another tourist, a California antiques dealer, who was fishing around for a Gocta visit. I found a guide company in the region willing to take me to the waterfall and show me around the archaeological highlights during a six-day flying visit. The Chachapoyas area of northern Peru already attracts two kinds of tourists: birders and a trickle of hard-core archaeology buffs, those who have already seen (or been turned off by) the hugely popular Machu Picchu (so commercial in places you might call it Inca Inc.). We have rivers, lakes, archaeology and now this waterfall.” “I don’t know if it’s the third-highest waterfall on Earth, but I know it’s a very high waterfall,” said Peter Lerche, a German anthropologist who has lived here since 1980. The Hanging Gardens, for example, may have been a wow, but you know the real treat was knocking about the back roads of Babylon. After all, billboard attractions are often not as fun as the areas that surround them. Known region that really does have a lot to offer anyone lured in. That ensures tourist interest in a spectacular but little.

Whether Gocta deserves the bronze, “third-highest” gives it instant Seven Wonders cred. Waterfall people – who are a lot like train people and lighthouse people – are burning up the discussion boards, debating Gocta’s place on the charts with fierce references to seasonal flow, degree of slope and something called “freeleap.”Īll of which makes Peru’s bold claim such a brilliant stroke of marketing.

It turns out that waterfall ranking is, well, rancorous. Gocta came in at 2,532 feet, which put it, by Ziemendorff’s reckoning, at No. He got the Peruvian government to survey it, checked his National Geographic stats and called a press conference. It took a German engineer named Stefan Ziemendorff, working on a nearby water project, to realize that the nameless falls might boast world-class specs. “But we didn’t know it was one of the tallest in the world.” “We knew it was there,” Chuquimes said as he busily delivered bottles of beer and Inca Kola to a group of Gocta-bound students from Chiclayo, a day’s drive away. It’s mostly Peruvians coming so far, eager to make the acquaintance of a new national icon. On the other side of the valley, another village has logged just more than 1,000 Gocta tourists. According to the wrinkled sign-in book on his bar, more than 70 people had made the trip by the time I got there at the end of the dry season. Now Chuquimes’ little cantina serves as an unofficial visitors center. Tourists were unknown in San Pablo before word spread about Gocta last spring. Luis Chuquimes is an elder in the tiny village of San Pablo, a few hours’ hike from the falls. So how do you discover a waterfall? The local people knew about it, of course. In the meantime, getting to Gocta requires bone-jarring days on the terrifying roads and hours on steep and dubious valley trails.

The new waterfall, dubbed Gocta after an ancient Chachapoyan village, is deep in one of the many blind valleys they inhabited between 8.Īccording to the press release, the government of Peru was hard on the case, promising safe tourist access and basic accommodations, hopefully starting in 2007 (don’t count on it). This high, dry tropical Shangri-La was the domain of the Chachapoyas, a mysterious Andean race that predated the Incas. Who cares? If it was that big and that remote, I just wanted to get there before they bulldozed a road, built the hotels and generally tarted up the place.Īnd so in September, I set off on the most harrowing waterfall side trip of all: an overnight flight from Washington to Lima, a dawn hop to the northern coastal city of Chiclayo and a 12-hour drive over dicey mountain roads to Peru’s impossibly secluded upper Amazon basin. A 250-story waterfall that instantly climbs up on the podium with Venezuela’s Angel Falls and South Africa’s Tugela Falls? How did that avoid the unblinking eye of satellite cartographers? But the major landforms were all mapped out long ago. The biggest things they discover these days are new species of beetle and, every now and then, a forgotten cable network. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menuīut the press release that crossed my desk last spring was darned near irresistible: “World’s Third-Highest Waterfall Discovered in Peru.” Howzat? Discovered? The Age of Discovery was ages ago.

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