Iguazu Falls isn’t a single waterfall but a system of roughly 275 individual falls, spread across nearly 3 kilometres on the border between Argentina and Brazil, fed by the Iguazu River as it plunges into a basalt gorge below. Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have exclaimed “Poor Niagara!” upon first seeing it, a comparison that has followed both waterfalls ever since, Iguazu is wider, and by most measures more dramatic, than its North American counterpart.
Its centrepiece, the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil’s Throat, is a U-shaped chasm where roughly half the river’s total flow converges and drops nearly 82 metres in a single, thunderous curtain, generating a constant cloud of spray visible for kilometres and audible long before it comes into view.
A Border Drawn Through Falling Water
The falls sit at the meeting point of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, and the border itself runs directly through parts of the falls system, meaning visitors experience genuinely different views depending on which country’s national park they enter from. The Argentine side offers extensive walkways bringing visitors directly over and beside individual falls, while the Brazilian side provides sweeping panoramic views of the whole system at once, two completely different ways of encountering the same place.
The surrounding subtropical rainforest, protected as national parks on both sides of the border, is home to jaguars, giant anteaters, and hundreds of butterfly species, along with coatis, raccoon-like mammals that have become notorious for boldly approaching visitors in search of food.
Painting Water in Constant Motion
The sheer scale and spray of Iguazu, rainbows forming and dissolving in the mist, give a watercolourist an almost impossibly dynamic subject to capture in a single still image. We’ve captured that constant motion in our own Iguazu Falls Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of South America for a wall at home.
Too vast to photograph, let alone paint, in a single satisfying frame, Iguazu Falls remains one of the few places where “you had to be there” is simply, unavoidably, true.