In Mayuluaipu’s telling, five brothers at the foot of Roroima had nothing to eat. Akuli the agouti, a forest rodent, had found the tree Wazak\u00e1 deep in the woods, hung with all kinds of bananas, papaya, cashew fruit, oranges and corn, and was eating there every day in secret. When the eldest brother, Ma’nape, announced he would cut the tree down, the agouti warned that cutting it would unleash a great water and plugged each axe cut with fruit peels and beeswax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The tree stump that remained standing (yei-piape) is Roroima,” the Taulipang text reads. In the Arekuna version it is Makunaima who insists on felling the tree, and the stump of Wazak\u00e1 forms Roroima today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bananas nobody planted<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Had the tree fallen toward the narrators’ side, the story goes, there would be many bananas in the forest there. It fell to the other side of Roroima instead, toward the wet forest to the north, where banana groves “that nobody planted” belong to the Mauari, mountain spirits whose houses include Roraima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Water poured out of the stump, and with it came big fish, which all swam north too. In the Arekuna version the fallen trunk lies across the Caron\u00ed River as rock, forming a high waterfall. The story also explains, Koch-Gr\u00fcnberg added, the waters that plunge down from Roroima’s summit. In his 1917 travel account he called the mountain “the cradle of the human race” for these peoples, the subject of many of their songs and myths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across the border in Brazil, the mountain lies in the territory of the Ingarik\u00f3, around 1,900 people in 14 communities, one of which, Mapa\u00e9, has its center inside the park. Their name means people who live high on the mountain range, according to ICMBio’s 2026 management plan<\/a>. In their account the tree cutter is Siik\u00eb. The plan says the Ingarik\u00f3 see themselves as his descendants and credit him, after he cut the Wayaka Yek, the tree of all plants, with the diversity of animals and plants, the rock paintings and the geology of their region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plan also lists soldier stones, or pedras-soldados, that guard Mount Roraima, Mount Cabura\u00ed and the Serra do Sol, among other peaks. The Serra do Sol, about 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) high, appears in the plan as W\u00eei-t\u00eep\u00ee, a form of Wei-tepui, and is a separate mountain from Roraima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Locals know Roraima as a big water tank, or grande caixa d’\u00e1gua, the plan notes. Springs on the mountain feed the Cotingo in Brazil, the Arabop\u00f3 in Venezuela and the Kako in Guyana, and according to Indigenous knowledge these rivers hold several places of respect that must be safeguarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A decree on June 28, 1989, created Brazil’s park, 116,000 hectares (about 448 square miles) in Uiramut\u00e3. The Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Land, ratified in 2005, covers all of it, so the plan describes the area as triply protected: Indigenous land, national park and border strip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The usual trail to the summit, from Paraitepui, runs through Venezuela’s Canaima National Park, which UNESCO put on the World Heritage List<\/a> in 1994. It covers 3 million hectares (about 11,600 square miles) of Bol\u00edvar State, and UNESCO says roughly 65 percent of it is covered by tepui formations. Its cliffs include what UNESCO calls the world’s highest waterfall, Angel Falls, at about 3,280 feet (1,000 meters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 1999, Pedro Rosabal of IUCN and Jos\u00e9 Pedro de Oliveira Costa of the World Heritage Centre visited the park and counted about 80 Pem\u00f3n communities inside it, home to 12,000 to 15,000 people. The Pem\u00f3n, they wrote, “have been managing fires for centuries in this area and have their own traditional procedures for control.” Their report also called the communities key players in stopping illegal mining on their lands and said this should be fully recognized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indigenous experts are shaping fieldwork elsewhere too. In Western Australia, Aboriginal ranger divers worked beside archaeologists<\/a> at a drowned spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ICMBio’s plan lists Roraima at 8,970 feet (2,734 meters) and traces the tepuis to the Roraima Supergroup, sandstone laid down around 2 billion years ago. A 2003 study in the Geological Society of America Bulletin<\/a>, led by geologist Jo\u00e3o Orestes Schneider Santos, dated zircon crystals from thin beds of tuff, or hardened volcanic ash, inside the sandstone to 1,873 million years, plus or minus 3 million. Geologists use the same mineral for a 4.4-billion-year-old grain from Western Australia’s Jack Hills<\/a> and for 1,712 crystals drilled from the seafloor around Antarctica<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Koch-Gr\u00fcnberg’s own words, the hero stories of these closely related peoples differ in some points, and the tree is Wazak\u00e1 in his books and Wayaka Yek in the 2026 plan. The plan also says Ingarik\u00f3 ties to places of respect are still poorly understood. Some sit inside the park, like a dragon’s cave near the Pipi do Manalai community and a giant wasp near Mount Roraima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The label mother of all waters circulates widely for Roraima, but it does not appear in the UNESCO, ICMBio or academic sources checked for this story, which speak instead of the home of the mother, Im\u00e9, and of a big water tank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Paolo Costa Baldi \/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brazil’s new management plan for the national park on Mount Roraima, where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet, names the tree … <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/roraima-waterfalls-after-rain.jpg\")
The Ingarik\u00f3 and Brazil’s park<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Canaima holds the Venezuelan side<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Rocks close to 2 billion years old<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What the records leave open<\/h2>\n\n\n\n