Which African river flows through Victoria Falls?

The Zambezi. The falls are not the tallest or the widest in the world but have a fair claim to being the largest sheet of falling water - about 1,700 metres across dropping over 100 metres, which produces a spray column visible from thirty kilometres away. The local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means the smoke that thunders.

The geology is unusual and legible. The river runs across a plateau of basalt cut through by a series of cracks; it pours into one, cuts back along it, then eventually breaks through to the next. The zigzag gorge downstream is the record of at least seven previous positions of the falls, so the whole feature is walking slowly upstream, and where it will be next is already visible as a fracture in the rock.

David Livingstone reached them in 1855 and named them for his queen, which is the naming that stuck internationally while the older one has been increasingly restored. The falls have also been a working boundary and a bargaining chip: they sit on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border, and the bridge across the gorge, built in 1905, was positioned at Cecil Rhodes's instruction so that trains would be close enough to catch the spray.