French Guiana, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela,
and Suriname. This mass of ancient sandstone
and quartzite gradually fractured and eroded
until roughly 30 million years ago, when the
hundred or so tepuis that exist today took on
something resembling their present form.
Gondwana split apart eons ago, but this part
of South America still holds many clues to its
shared past with Africa. Today some of the
species endemic to tepuis are closely related to
plants and animals found in West Africa, and the
types of diamonds mined in Sierra Leone and
Guinea are the same as those that erode from
tepui cliffs and are carried downstream in the
Paikwa and other rivers.
The first European to see a tepui was probably
the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who
led an expedition up the Orinoco in 1595 while
searching for El Dorado, the fabled lost city
of gold. Raleigh wrote about seeing a crystal
mountain in the distance, which might have
been Mount Roraima: “It appeared like a white
church-tower of an exceeding height. There fall-
eth over it a mighty river which toucheth no part
of the side of the mountain, but rusheth over
the top of it, and falleth to the ground with so
terrible a noise and clamour, as if a thousandEXPLORER: THE LAST TEPUI
Follow as the team searches for
new species on South America’s
sky islands, available to stream
on Disney+ starting April 22.UP THE MOUNTAIN, TO A WORLD APART 49