Until recently, the Cayambe Coca National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon was home to the San Rafael waterfall, a spectacular waterfall surrounded by lush vegetation but suddenly, on February 2, 2020, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Tourism announced that it had evaporated. The images, both from Ecuador's Ministry of the Environment and NASA's Landsat 8 satellite, confirm this.
How could such a great waterfall disappear so unexpectedly?
According to the government of Ecuador, there have been a series of landslides that have generated a sinkhole a few meters before the waterfall, causing the water to flow in three sections separated by a rather less steep and spectacular slope.
The precise cause of the landslides, however, remains a point of controversy since, despite the fact that the San Rafael waterfall was in a seismically active area, some people suggest that what happened has to do with the recent construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair dam, one of the largest hydroelectric plants in Ecuador being built upstream.
The truth is that right now what we can see is a huge hole in the river bed where just before the original waterfall stood majestically. As if it had never existed.
