Ruacaná Falls

It is approximately 80 m high and approximately 700 m wide during the rainy season.
The group constitutes one of the largest waterfalls in Africa, in terms of flow and width.
Immediately upstream, the Ruacaná Dam was built, which in conjunction with the Calueque Dam, located about 40 km upstream, feeds a hydroelectric power station built by the Republic of South Africa in the 1970s and a water supply system serving northern Namibia.

At Ruacaná Falls, Cunene makes a leap into the void that launches it towards the sea. A set of rapid and small slopes slide down the mountain in Calueque, in an unmissable spectacle of water grooves.
They are, according to accounts and views, one of the largest waterfalls on the entire African continent.
Ruacaná is a corruption of the name of a local soba, produced by the harsh language of the Germans who walked through these lands, before there was Angola and Namibia as we know them today.

After landmark one of the Angolan border was placed there , Cunene would gain a Southern dimension.
The Ruacaná Falls would be the dividing line.
And right away, one of the most visited places in the region.
This set of rapids and waterfalls fed by the Cunene delimit the rocky plains of Ombawé.
The waters churn between huge boulders, cliffs and gorges that, deep down, funnel the Cunene in the last few kilometers before giving itself over to the Atlantic, at its wonderful mouth.

The size is impressive:
When the water comes with full force during the rainy season, the fall widens for around 700 meters that plunge down a 120 meter cliff.
They are part of the catalog of the biggest falls in Africa.

They say that this place was even more impressive before the construction of hydroelectric plants that regulated its flow.

And before the increasingly frequent droughts that transform the Ruacaná Falls into a lunar landscape crossed by a suffocating Cunene.

But it is when the water comes, in torrents, from the top of the 1840 meters where the river originates (Boas Águas, in Huambo), that Ruacaná becomes the Falls.

Thick drops shoot out in all directions, light Breezes surround the trees that grow on the cliff's cliffs.

Deep roots, overcoming the brutal force of the liquid in gravitational movement.

Play it safe, and visit the Falls during the rainy season. At that time, the spectacle is even greater.
The people who live in the region are the Himba, descendants of the Herero people (southern Angola) who descended southwards into northern Namibia in search of better pasture areas for their cattle.

They live essentially from pastoralism. also cultivating corn for substance, with its diet being based on meat, eggs, corn, aromatic herbs and honey.

Their dialect is the Otjiherero dialect of Niger-Congolese, spoken by the Hereros in Namibia, Angola and Botswana.