Mosi-oa-Tunya / Victoria Falls
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How it came to be
Here the Zambezi falls over a width of 1,708 m. In Lozi the falls are Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, and in Tonga Shungu Namutitima, boiling water. Below them a zigzag of gorges runs for about 150 km, marking the line along which the falls have cut back upstream, and stone tools of Homo habilis about three million years old have been found in the area.
On 16 November 1855 the Scottish missionary David Livingstone became the first European recorded to see the falls, and named them after Queen Victoria. Local people knew them well, and a map by Nicolas de Fer of 1715 already marked them in the correct position. Livingstone returned in 1860 with John Kirk to study the falls in detail.
In 1905, as part of Cecil Rhodes's Cape to Cairo railway scheme, a 198 m steel arch bridge was built across the Second Gorge just below the falls. Rhodes never visited the falls and died before work began. In 1989 an area of 6,860 ha shared by Zambia and Zimbabwe was inscribed as a World Heritage site.
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