Kambadaga Falls is the only place on Earth where two waterfall plants are still known to survive. The Kokoulo River, draining the Fouta Djallon plateau some 21 kilometres west of Pita, drops here in a staircase of four cascades — the first two the tallest — falling more than 60 metres in all, over a rock lip that widens to about 100 metres when the rains are heaviest. The river has cut down through quartzite-rich sandstone into older, darker rock, which is why the water arrives in broad steps and sheets rather than one clean plunge. Glued to the wet ledges lives a family of plants that grows only in fast water, the Podostemaceae. Botanists from Kew and Guinea's national herbarium recorded four species here, and for two of them — Inversodicraea abbayesii and Stonesia fascicularis — this is the only known site anywhere. Both had been lost at Kinkon Falls, 15 kilometres upstream, when a dam went in there, and were feared globally extinct until they turned up on these rocks.
Reaching the water takes a rough track out of Bourouwal-Tappé and a steep half-hour descent through farmland and thin ribbons of gallery forest; the roar arrives before the view does. In the dry months the river narrows to clear strands and lays bare wide slabs, where families from the villages wade, wash and swim in the pool below each step, and a footbridge lets you cross the Kokoulo and look back at the whole staircase. When the sun climbs high enough to reach into the gorge, it catches the mist under the main drop and a rainbow stands over the plunge pool. The site carries no protected status: it has been earmarked for a hydroelectric dam, and a 291-megawatt scheme is under study on this same stretch of the Kokoulo.