54 Fun Facts About Victoria Falls

David Livingstone wrote that the river scenery above the falls 'must have been gazed upon by' whom 'in their flight'?

Angels: the line is often quoted about the falls themselves, though he wrote it of the wooded river upstream, and sightseeing flights over the falls are still sold as the Flight of Angels.

Victoria Falls joined which international list in 1989, entered under both its Lozi and English names?

UNESCO World Heritage Sites: one listing spans both banks under the double name Mosi-oa-Tunya / Victoria Falls, taking in national parks in Zambia and Zimbabwe, so two countries have to look after a single site.

What does Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Lozi name for Victoria Falls, mean?

The smoke that thunders: Livingstone first saw the spray from miles upriver and wrote that its columns rose exactly like the smoke of a great African grass fire.

Which journalist found David Livingstone in 1871 and is famed for the greeting "Dr Livingstone, I presume"?

Henry Morton Stanley was sent by the New York Herald and found the missing explorer, ill and short of supplies, at Ujiji in 1871, sixteen years after Livingstone had first seen the falls.

Which title does Victoria Falls usually claim?

Largest waterfall: it is neither the tallest nor the widest, but at about 1,700 metres across with a drop of up to 108 metres it forms the world's largest sheet of falling water.

Victoria Falls drops about twice as far as which other famous waterfall?

Niagara Falls: Victoria's plunge of up to 108 metres is about double Niagara's, and because its water lands in a walled-in chasm, not an open basin, the spray is forced high into the air.

After plunging into the chasm at Victoria Falls, how does the whole Zambezi get out?

Through one narrow gap: the chasm's only exit is a cleft cut in its far wall, so a river about 1,700 metres wide is squeezed into a single gorge that zigzags away below.

What is the deep, swirling pool where the Zambezi turns sharply just below Victoria Falls called?

The Boiling Pot is smooth at low water, but in flood it heaves with slow, enormous swirls; a steep footpath from the Zambian side leads down to it.

Which of the main streams of the curtain is the highest?

The streams run from the Devil's Cataract on the Zimbabwe side to the Eastern Cataract on the Zambian side.

Since the 1980s, the gorges just below Victoria Falls have been a famous venue for which adventure sport?

White-water rafting: the Zambezi squeezes through the zigzag gorges in rapids graded up to 5, the hardest class that commercial rafts will run.

In which month does the Zambezi's flood usually peak at Victoria Falls?

April: the flood crests as the summer rains end, and at its height the spray hides so much of the falls that visitors see more of the rock face in the drier months.

Late in the dry season, which part of Victoria Falls is often reduced to bare rock?

The eastern end, in Zambia: with the river low from about September to January, up to half the rock face can stand dry, and the floor of the chasm shows along most of its length.

What rare night-time sight appears in the spray of Victoria Falls on a few evenings each month?

A moonbow: around full moon the light is strong enough to raise a rainbow in the spray, but it is too faint to stir the eye's colour receptors, so the arc usually looks white.

Pictures of Victoria Falls slowed to a trickle in late 2019 were widely reported as a warning about what?

Climate change: a severe drought had cut the flow far below normal, though the falls also shrink to a fraction of their flood size in every dry season.

David Livingstone planted peach stones and coffee beside the falls in 1855; which animals did he fear would wreck his garden?

Hippos: he had seen their footprints and named them as his one fear for it, and he was right, because the plot he hoped would be the parent of all the country's gardens was soon trampled flat.

What rock does the Zambezi cut through at Victoria Falls?

Basalt: the old lava flows are riddled with long cracks, and the river scours them out one after another, leaving each abandoned line of the falls as another zigzag gorge.

Before it drained east through the Batoka Gorge, the Upper Zambezi originally flowed south to join which river?

The Limpopo: uplift across the Kalahari cut that route and left the upper river draining into an inland basin, until the lower Zambezi captured it and sent it east over the falls.

What did David Livingstone do at the falls for the only time on his travels, calling it a 'piece of vanity'?

Carved his initials: he cut D.L. and the date 1855 into a tree, and later visitors, his own brother among them, added theirs.

In 1910 the world professional title in which sport was contested on the Zambezi just above Victoria Falls?

Rowing: the region's administrators paid to stage the world sculling title race there to advertise the falls, and New Zealand's Richard Arnst beat England's Ernest Barry.

What killed so many settlers at the Old Drift, the riverside outpost above Victoria Falls, in the early 1900s?

Fever: the camp sat beside mosquito breeding grounds and malaria kept killing its settlers, so a new town, Livingstone, was laid out on higher ground, and the 1905 bridge made the old crossing redundant as well.

Luxury BOAC airliners flying from England to Johannesburg in 1948 stopped overnight at Victoria Falls; where did they land?

On the river itself: the airliners were Solent flying boats, which took four days over the trip and set down on the water above the falls so passengers could spend a night at the hotel.

Cecil Rhodes meant the bridge at Victoria Falls to carry a railway running from the Cape to which city?

Cairo: the line was never completed, so a bridge built as one link in a railway spanning all of Africa ended up joining just two neighbours.

Cecil Rhodes insisted the Victoria Falls Bridge be built at what kind of spot?

One where trains would catch the spray: Rhodes chose it in London from sketches and travellers' accounts, having never seen the falls, and he died three years before the bridge opened.

How did engineers get the first line across the gorge when work on the Victoria Falls Bridge began?

By rocket: it carried a light cord to men waiting on the far cliff, the cord pulled over a wire, the wire a rope, and the rope the heavy cable that would ferry the bridge parts across.

The Victoria Falls Bridge was opened in 1905 by George, the scientist son of which famous Victorian?

Charles Darwin: his son George, an astronomer who studied the tides, opened it as president of the British Association during the Association's 1905 visit to the falls.

Ralph Freeman, who checked the stresses for the Victoria Falls Bridge, later did the detailed design of which landmark?

Sydney Harbour Bridge: the Zambezi arch was built out from both banks until the halves met in mid-air, and Freeman's far larger Sydney arch went up the same way.

The Victoria Falls Bridge's two halves overlapped by an inch at first; what made them fit by morning?

The steel shrank as it cooled: a day of African sun had stretched the arch by an inch and a quarter, and by the next sunrise it had drawn back enough for the ends to meet exactly.

What do thrill-seekers do from the Victoria Falls Bridge, dropping 111 metres towards the Zambezi?

Bungee jump: the leap from the century-old railway bridge helped turn the falls from a sedate sightseeing stop into a town with a reputation as the adrenalin capital of Africa.

The 'Blondin' cableway that carried Victoria Falls Bridge parts across the gorge was named after a famous what?

Tightrope walker: Charles Blondin was the great Victorian daredevil of the high wire, and the cableway named after him swung a whole locomotive across in pieces before the bridge existed.

The Zambian town of Livingstone, beside the falls, held what role from 1911 to 1935?

Capital of Northern Rhodesia: the colonial government decided the town lay too far south and built a new capital at more central Lusaka, which took over in 1935.

Which animals cross the Zambezi just above Victoria Falls in the dry season, moving between Zimbabwe and Zambia?

Elephants: when the river drops, herds wade and swim over by way of the islands, following old migration routes that pass through the national parks on both banks.

Which national park, Zimbabwe's largest, lies south of Victoria Falls on the road to the country's second city?

Hwange: Zimbabwe's biggest reserve began as a game reserve in 1928, and safari areas link it to the small parks at the falls, so wildlife can range between them.

What is the natural rock pool at the very edge of Victoria Falls, where visitors swim at low water, called?

Devil's Pool: at low water, usually from about September to December, a lip of rock holds back the current, so swimmers can lie at the very edge of the drop in relative safety.

Which heavily guarded animals, brought in from South Africa, can visitors see in Zambia's small national park beside the falls?

White rhinos: Zambia's native black rhinos had been wiped out, so these were imported and are watched by wildlife scouts day and night.

Which sharp-toothed predator of the Zambezi draws sport anglers to the river above Victoria Falls?

Tigerfish: it is one of dozens of species recorded above the falls, which act as a wall that fish cannot climb, so the river below them holds a different community.

What kind of forest grows on the cliff facing Victoria Falls, nurtured all year by its spray?

Rainforest: the spray falls on it like constant rain, yet ecologists class it as riverside forest kept lush by the mist, not true tropical rainforest.

From where did David Livingstone get his first close view of the falls in 1855?

An island on the very lip: boatmen who knew the rapids paddled him down midstream while the river was low, and he crept to the edge to peer into the chasm.

How did David Livingstone's party measure the chasm's depth at Victoria Falls?

Lowered a weighted line: a few bullets and a strip of white cloth were tied to the end, and one man lay with his head over a crag to watch it until 310 feet had been paid out.

David Livingstone, the first European known to have seen the falls, was laid to rest in which London church?

Westminster Abbey: his attendants buried his heart beneath a tree in what is now Zambia, then carried his body to the coast so that it could be shipped home.

Into which body of water does the Zambezi finally empty, far downstream of Victoria Falls?

The Indian Ocean: it is the longest east-flowing river in Africa, and the bull shark, which swims up rivers from the sea, is known across southern Africa as the Zambezi shark.

Only three African rivers are longer than the Zambezi: the Nile, the Congo and which other?

The Niger: it runs about 4,180 km through West Africa, while published lengths for the Zambezi range from under 2,600 km to more than 3,500, enough for fourth place either way.

Which dam on the Zambezi, downstream of Victoria Falls, holds back the world's largest man-made lake by volume?

Kariba: as the valley flooded behind it, rangers spent years plucking thousands of stranded animals from shrinking islands by boat, a rescue remembered as Operation Noah.

What has stood in the gorge just below Victoria Falls since the 1930s, fed by water taken from the river above?

A hydroelectric station: a company formed in 1906 to send the falls' power to the gold mines of the Rand gave up the idea and burned coal there instead, and this small plant opened only three decades later.

The Kazungula Bridge, upstream of Victoria Falls, links Zambia with which country?

Botswana: opened in 2021 beside the point where Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe almost meet, it replaced a ferry and gave lorries a way round the crowded crossing at Beitbridge.

Where did Rhodesia's government and nationalist leaders hold peace talks at Victoria Falls in 1975?

In a train on the bridge: the carriage was parked across the border line so that Rhodesia's delegates sat in their own country and the nationalists in Zambia, but nine and a half hours of talks got nowhere.

How did travellers cross the Zambezi above Victoria Falls before the 1905 bridge?

By dugout canoe or cable-towed barge: the landing place, the Old Drift, grew into the first European settlement on the north bank, the forerunner of the town of Livingstone.

David Livingstone's party put the width of the falls at 1,860 yards, a figure they kept because it matched what?

The survey year: they measured a little over 1,860 yards in 1860 and resolved to keep the round figure as a reminder of the year the falls were first carefully examined.

Workmen building the Victoria Falls Bridge complained that which safety measure made them nervous?

A net slung below the arch: it never had to catch a man, only dropped tools, yet the workers said that seeing it hung beneath their feet was unsettling.

Which paleolake formed when uplift blocked the Upper Zambezi's old southward route 2 million years ago?

About 20,000 years ago it overflowed eastward and began cutting the Batoka Gorge through the basalt.

Roughly where along the Zambezi's course to the sea does Victoria Falls lie?

About halfway along: the broad upper river reaches the edge without gathering speed, so little but its roar and a veil of spray warns of the drop.

Which large reptiles are plentiful in the Zambezi just above Victoria Falls?

Nile crocodiles: the name misleads, because the species lives in rivers and lakes across most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Zambezi included.

Which tree, whose caterpillars are a prized snack across southern Africa, dominates the dry woodland around Victoria Falls?

Mopane: its wood resists termites so well that builders prize it, and the dense timber is now turned into clarinets and other woodwinds.

David Livingstone, who gave Victoria Falls its English name, grew up in which country?

Scotland: he grew up in a one-room tenement at Blantyre and was sent to work in a cotton mill at the age of ten, long before he trained as a doctor and missionary.

The railway that first carried tourists to Victoria Falls ran north-west from which Zimbabwean city?

Bulawayo: until the line arrived the falls were rarely visited, but once it did a tourist could board a train in Cape Town and ride all the way to the edge of the gorge.