Karfiguéla Falls step down a broad staircase of banded sandstone rather than dropping in a single plunge, and rough steps cut into the rock let you climb right to the calm bathing pools at the very top. About 12 kilometres northwest of Banfora, in the far southwest of Burkina Faso, the upper Comoé River meets the edge of the Banfora cliffs and spreads across a wide shelf of rock, splitting into dozens of small cascades and clear channels instead of one waterfall. The stone is layered in fine dark and ochre bands, cut by the river into terraces and shallow ledges. This is the Comoé near its beginning — a river that runs more than a thousand kilometres on into Côte d'Ivoire and the Gulf of Guinea, but here still young, shallow enough to wade.
You reach the falls on foot, walking the last stretch under a long avenue of mango trees and through kapok forest before the rock opens out. Climb the fifteen minutes to the top and you find still pools where local families and the few travellers who come here swim and cool off. The falls run fullest from June to September, when the rainy season turns the water the colour of red earth and it thunders across the full width of the rock; by the dry months the flow thins to clear pools threading between the strata, and the terraced stone itself becomes the spectacle. Long one of Burkina Faso's most visited natural sites, the falls now see few foreign visitors: the country's security crisis has placed the Cascades Region under a state of emergency, and most governments advise against all travel.