Case file · Folklore / legend
First ascent of Roraima, the 'lost world'
On 18 December 1884 Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins became the first outsiders to climb Mount Roraima, the table mountain on the Venezuela-Guyana-Brazil border that Pemón tradition treats as sacred.
1884 CE · 5.14, -60.76 · status: explained
The account
Reports of its isolated summit helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World, in which dinosaurs survive on a South American plateau. The summit has unique plants and frogs, but no dinosaurs.
Connections in the atlas
- Koch-Grünberg records Makunaima
- Fawcett's 'lost world' on the Huanchaca plateau
- Schomburgk at Lake Amucu
- The sinkholes of Sarisariñama