Venezuela: Physical Geography

Venezuela, on the northern coast of South America, is shaped roughly like an inverted triangle and spans around 912,000 square kilometers. Observers commonly divide the country into four broad physical regions: the Maracaibo lowlands in the northwest, a northern mountain belt that forms the easternmost extension of the Andes, the Llanos plains stretching along the Orinoco River, and the Guiana Highlands south of the Orinoco, which alone account for more than half of the national territory.

The Maracaibo lowlands form a flat, spoon-shaped basin draining into Lake Maracaibo, South America's largest lake, and hold much of the country's petroleum reserves. To the east, two Andean mountain ranges rise around the lowlands, including the Cordillera de Mérida, home to Pico Bolívar, Venezuela's highest peak at 4,978 meters. A separate coastal mountain system runs along the Caribbean, its valleys sheltering Caracas and most of Venezuela's population, while the Llanos extend roughly 1,300 kilometers of savanna and seasonally flooded plains between the mountains and the Orinoco.

South of the Orinoco, the ancient Guiana Highlands rise into plateaus and the sandstone tepuis for which the region is known, among them Auyán-tepui, source of Angel Falls, widely recognized as the world's highest waterfall. The Orinoco itself, fed by more than a thousand tributaries, ranks among South America's largest rivers and drains the bulk of the country before reaching the Atlantic through a low, swampy delta.