Their name comes from the Guarani or Tupi words “y” (water) and ûasú (big). Legend has it that a god planned to marry a beautiful aborigine named Naipí, who fled with her mortal lover Tarobá in a canoe. In rage, the god sliced the river creating the waterfalls, condemning the lovers to an eternal fall.
Iguazu Falls was short-listed as a candidate to be one of the New7Wonders of Nature by the New Seven Wonders of the World Foundation. As of February 2009 it was ranking fifth in Group F, the category for lake, rivers, and waterfalls.
The waterfall system consists of 275 falls along 2.7 kilometers (1.67 miles) of the Iguazu River. Some of the individual falls are up to 82 meters (269 ft) in height, though the majority are about 64 metres (210 ft). The Devil's Throat (Garganta del Diablo in Spanish), a U-shaped, 82-meter-high, 150-meter-wide and 700-meter-long (490 by 2300 feet) cataract, is the most impressive of all.
About 900 meters of the 2.7-kilometer length does not have water flowing over it. The edge of the basalt cap recedes only 3 mm (0 in) per year. The water of the lower Iguazu collects in a canyon that drains into the Paraná River, shortly downstream from the Itaipu dam.
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