The Falls were seen for the first time by the Guayanan explorer Felix Cardona in 1927.
Ten years later, the American pilot Jimmy Angel, landed on the top of the Auyan.
He was looking for a gold mine. But the plane got bogged down in a swamp area, and they had to descend on foot.
After 15 days of hard struggle for survival, they arrived exhausted at the village of Uruyen.
Since then the Kerepakupai has been known as the Angel Falls.
Did Jimmy Angel find the gold of the Auyan?
Some people say he did, and that one of his partners, the Latvian Alexander Laimel, kept it in secret.
This mysterious figure dedicated his life to the Auyan-Tepuy, and even lived on its summit.
What did this eccentric cartographer see on the Auyan-Tepuy?
Laimel died some years ago without revealing his secrets,
but to those of us who knew him he spoke of mutants,
of beings from another world who lived on the Auyan, the sacred mountain of the Pemons.
We are now flying south, to the Makiritare village of Canaracuni,
the only clearing in the jungle for some 800 Km
An hour by canoe along the river Canaracuni, we had our first encounter with the Sanema,
a nomad group which had split off from the Yanomamis,
"The Fierce People", as they were unjustly named by the North American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.
Though they and the Yanomami have common ancestors,
the linguistic separation took place a long time ago, much earlier than that of French and Spanish, for example.
Today, their languages are mutually unintelligible, though their customs are almost identical.
The Sanema abandon their villages when hunting becomes scarce.
They then move to a distant region where they can more easily capture their favourite prey:
the dantos or tapirs and the vaquiros, a type of wild pig, smaller than the boar.
Their houses are large and open-plan.
On the walls made of sticks and sometimes of mud, they place a covering of palm leaves.
The fire is the central focus of the room.
One side is used as a store for the food and the few utensils they own.
In the rest of the space they hang their hammocks, in which they rest and sleep.
Though they are hunters, they also grow some crops, essentially bananas and manioc,
which, along with the proteins they obtain from hunting and fishing, make up their diet.
The crop lands belong to the community.
The women are in charge of growing and harvesting the crops.
The manioc is a bush of the euphorbia family, between one and two metres high,
which develops very large roots in the form of fleshy tubers.
They are very nutritious, due to the quantity of starch they contain.
The Sanema women are responsible for the majority of domestic tasks:
they gather fruit and firewood in the forest, work the land, cook and look after the younger children.
The men spend almost all their time hunting and occasionally fishing in the streams near the village.
Once they have been dug up, the manioc roots are washed and grated using these graters with thin metal points.
Some years ago, a DC-3 airplane crashed into the river, just a short distance from the village.
Since then, the Sanema have used the aluminium of its fuselage to make small metal tips for their graters.
On occasions, their neighbours the Makiritare, or Yecuana as they are also known,
come here in their canoes to trade with the Sanema.
They exchange plastic basins, machetes, graters, salt and red cloth for skins,
smoked meat and dried fish.
The tapioca, which is the product of grating the manioc, is placed in the seucan,
a flexible basket which serves to squeeze out the liquid.
Making the seucans, also called tinquis, is a job reserved exclusively for the old men,
who meticulously carry out their work because they have the gift of patience.
The juice of the manioc contain hydrocyanide acid, which is very poisonous,
and that is why they have to extract it, squeezing the tapioca in the seucan.
By means of a kind of press which tenses the fibre, using a lever, the poison slowly seeps out.
They are addicted to tobacco.
Both men and women take on a fierce appearance as they place a thick wad of tobacco between the lower lip and the gums.
More than the need to chew tobacco, this habit gives them the mineral salts that complement their diet.
They dampen the tobacco leaves and smear them with ashes.
Little by little they shape this mixture until they obtain a solid ball, which they place in their mouths.
Like so many other things that are communal among the Sanema,
the wads of tobacco are happily passed from mouth to mouth.
Such is the lack of salt in their diet that sometimes,
especially the pregnant women become geogphagists, that is, they eat soil.
They dig into the seams along the river banks and swallow handfuls of earth.
When the press has extracted all the poisonous juice, the tapioca is ready to make the cassava,
the bread of the jungle.
The tapioca may be cooked and then wrapped in banana leaves,
or toasted on a metal sheet to make flat cassava loaves.