Venezuela Geography & Climate

Venezuela covers about 916,000 square kilometres on the northern coast of South America, bordering Colombia, Brazil and Guyana, with some 2,800 kilometres of Caribbean shore.

The Guiana Shield and the tepuis

The south-east is one of the oldest exposed landscapes on earth — Precambrian sandstone laid down around two billion years ago and since eroded into tepuis, flat-topped plateaux with sheer walls a kilometre high rising abruptly out of savanna and forest. Their summits have been isolated for so long that many of their plants and amphibians exist on one mountain and nowhere else. Angel Falls pours off the side of Auyantepui, and at 979 metres is the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world.

The Andes

The range’s northern end runs through the west, reaching 4,978 metres at Pico Bolivar, with paramo moorland and, until recently, the country’s last glacier — now effectively gone.

Los Llanos

Between the Andes and the Orinoco lie vast flat plains that flood in the wet season and bake in the dry, supporting cattle and an enormous concentration of wildlife.

The Orinoco

One of the great rivers of South America, running some 2,100 kilometres and emptying through a delta of hundreds of channels into the Atlantic.

The lost world

An expedition to Roraima in 1884 brought back accounts of a plateau cut off from everything around it, and Arthur Conan Doyle used them for the novel that put dinosaurs on a South American tabletop mountain. The biology is less dramatic and more interesting: no dinosaurs, but a summit flora of carnivorous plants and tiny black frogs that walk rather than hop, many of them found on that one mountain and nowhere else on earth.

Lake Maracaibo

A vast brackish inlet in the north-west, the largest body of its kind in South America, ringed by oil infrastructure. At its southern end the Catatumbo lightning strikes on well over two hundred nights a year, among the most concentrated lightning anywhere on earth.

Venezuela lies wholly within the tropics, so temperature varies with altitude rather than with the calendar, and the year divides into a wet and a dry season instead of four.

The seasons

The dry season, locally verano, runs roughly December to April; the wet season, invierno, from May to November, with the heaviest rain between June and August. The names mean summer and winter, which confuses visitors, since they refer to rain rather than temperature.

By altitude

The coast, the plains and the Orinoco basin are hot year round, 26 to 34°C, humid near the sea. Between about 800 and 2,000 metres the climate is temperate and spring-like — this is where much of the population lives, and Caracas at around 900 metres averages a comfortable 22°C. Above 3,000 metres the Andean paramo is cold, wet and windy, and frost is normal at night.

The falls and the rains

This matters for planning. Angel Falls depends on rain: in the wet season it is a full torrent and the rivers are navigable up to it, while late in the dry season the flow can thin dramatically and the boat journey may not run at all. The best conditions for seeing it are the ones least comfortable to travel in.

The tepui summits

Roraima makes its own weather — cloud, drizzle and cold most days of the year, at any season. Expect to be wet on top.

Hurricanes

Venezuela lies south of the main Atlantic hurricane track and is rarely affected directly.