Waterfalls in Nepal: A Directory of Notable Jharana with Heights

Nepal's mountainous terrain, heavy monsoon rainfall and glacier-fed rivers create thousands of waterfalls, called jharana (झरना) or chhango (छाँगो) in Nepali. Only a small number are documented with measured heights, formal names and tourism infrastructure; most remain unnamed seasonal cascades on the flanks of the Himalaya and the Mahabharat (Middle Hills) range. This directory focuses on the waterfalls that appear repeatedly in Nepal Tourism Board destination material, district profiles, Nepali media and cross-referenced encyclopedic listings.

Two cautions run through every entry below. First, most published heights in Nepal are estimates rather than surveyed figures, so the same waterfall can appear at very different heights in different sources. Second, several waterfalls are seasonal: they are powerful during and just after the monsoon (roughly June to September, Asadh to Ashwin in the Bikram Sambat calendar) and reduce to a trickle in the dry pre-monsoon months. Where figures conflict we state both rather than picking a winner. The best-known falls cluster along tourist routes in Gandaki Province (Devi's Fall in Pokhara, Rupse in Myagdi), while the tallest documented ones sit in remote districts such as Kalikot (Karnali) and Terhathum (Koshi); accessibility, not height, largely determines fame.

The question of which is the tallest waterfall in Nepal does not have a settled answer, because the leading candidates have been measured by different methods at different times. For years, Hyatung Falls (also spelled Hyatrung) in Terhathum District was widely described as the country's tallest at 365 metres. That status was repeated in tourism promotion, including during the Visit Nepal 2020 campaign, and a 2003 Nepali Times article by Samuel Thomas even reported it as "reportedly the largest in Asia" — a claim that has never been formally verified.

That title was challenged after the local government of Pachal Jharana Rural Municipality in Kalikot District had the Pachal Waterfall surveyed. According to The Rising Nepal, a technical team using two GPS devices took two days to complete the measurement and confirmed a height of 381 metres, which the municipality promotes as making Pachal the tallest waterfall in Nepal — about 16 metres higher than Hyatung. Local officials also say this places Pachal among the roughly 30 tallest waterfalls in the world.

The 381-metre figure is not universal. The English Wikipedia entry for Pachal Waterfall cites 356 metres (1,168 feet) based on a GPS survey, and some tour-operator blogs cite figures as high as 481 to 483 metres. Because Nepal has no single authoritative national register of waterfall heights, amarnepal treats the tallest-waterfall claim as unresolved: Pachal (356 to 381 m by different accounts) and Hyatung (365 m) are the two strongest candidates, and any figure quoted for either should be read as the number a particular source reports, not a nationally certified measurement.

Pachal Waterfall, known locally as Pachal Jharana, lies deep in the rugged Kalikot District of Karnali Province, in the rural municipality that was renamed Pachal Jharana Rural Municipality after the fall itself. It became the centre of Nepal's tallest-waterfall debate after the local government commissioned a GPS survey; the resulting 381-metre figure, reported by The Rising Nepal and repeated by tour operators, is the basis for the claim that Pachal is the tallest waterfall in the country.

Despite the ranking claim, Pachal remains largely off the tourist map. Media coverage, including The Rising Nepal's own reporting, has noted that the waterfall stays "in oblivion" because of its remoteness and poor road access; reaching it involves travel to Kalikot in the Karnali highlands followed by a walk. The Karnali provincial government has declared the area a tourism development destination, and Ekantipur has reported the waterfall being listed as a formal tourist destination, but on-the-ground infrastructure is still limited compared with Pokhara-area falls.

For searchers looking up the Pachal jharana height, the honest summary is that the municipality's own survey gives 381 metres while the most-cited encyclopedic source gives 356 metres, and the two have not been reconciled. Anyone quoting a single 'official' Pachal height should specify which measurement they mean.

Devi's Fall is the most visited waterfall in Nepal, thanks to its location on the southern edge of Pokhara in Kaski District, Gandaki Province. It is written in English as Devi's Fall, Davis Falls or David's Falls, and is known in Nepali as Patale Chhango (पाताले छाँगो), meaning roughly "waterfall to the underworld," because the water plunges into a sinkhole and vanishes underground rather than pooling at the surface.

The water comes from the Pardi Khola stream, which drains the dammed Phewa Lake, so the fall's flow is closely tied to lake and dam levels and is strongest in the monsoon. After the plunge, the stream runs through an underground channel — reported at roughly 500 feet (150 m) long and about 100 feet (30 m) below ground — before re-emerging near the Gupteshwor Mahadev cave, a linked pilgrimage site directly across the road.

The unusual English name derives from a drowning. Wikipedia records that on 31 July 1961 a Swiss visitor drowned in the pit while swimming, and that the fall came to be named in her memory, which over time was rendered as Davis, David's and Devi's. Because it sits on the main road toward the World Peace Pagoda and the Tibetan settlements, Devi's Fall is a standard stop on Pokhara sightseeing itineraries and charges a small entry fee.

Rupse Falls, or Rupse Jharana, is a multi-tier cascade beside the Beni–Jomsom road in the former Dana area of Myagdi District, Gandaki Province, at the mouth of the Kali Gandaki gorge. Wikipedia gives its height as 300 metres (about 980 feet); it tumbles down the valley wall and its runoff feeds toward the Kali Gandaki River, the river that carves what is often described as the world's deepest gorge between the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna massifs.

Rupse's fame comes almost entirely from access: it is roadside, roughly 110 km from Pokhara and about 40 km short of Jomsom, so trekkers and jeep travellers on the Annapurna and Mustang routes pass directly beneath it. This has made "Rupse jharana" and even "Rupse waterfall Mustang" common searches, though the fall is technically in Myagdi District rather than Mustang; the confusion arises because the road it sits on is the main corridor into Mustang.

As a monsoon-fed fall on an active landslide-prone road, Rupse is vulnerable to flood and debris damage, and Nepali outlets have reported flooding and landslides degrading the site. Travellers should treat both its appearance and the road condition as seasonal.

Beyond the headline four, Nepal's compiled waterfall lists include a spread of documented falls across every region, with the same caveat that heights are mostly estimates. In the eastern hills, Todke Waterfall (about 85 m) in Ilam and Namaste Falls (about 80 m) in Dhankuta are local attractions in the tea-growing Koshi Province. In central Nepal, Tindhare Waterfall (about 300 m) in Kavrepalanchok, Sundarijal (about 75 m) and Jhor (about 30 m) around Kathmandu, and Bhorle Waterfall (about 100 m) in Dolakha are popular short-trip destinations.

In the west and Karnali, Narchyang Waterfall in Myagdi is listed by Wikipedia at 500 m — which, if accurate, would exceed the celebrated tall falls, illustrating exactly why single-source waterfall heights should be treated with caution. Other listed falls include Chyachhara (about 200 m) in Humla, Sunchhari (about 300 m) in Rolpa, Litheli (about 150 m) in Darchula and Purandhara (about 45 m) in Dang. These figures come from a crowd-edited list and are best read as indicative until confirmed by a survey.

The practical takeaway for visitors is to plan around access and season rather than around height rankings. The falls most worth a dedicated trip for the average traveller — Devi's Fall, Rupse, and increasingly Pachal and Hyatung for adventurous visitors — are notable as much for their setting and reachability as for any disputed measurement.

Waterfall heights in Nepal disagree for structural reasons, not just carelessness. Many published figures predate any instrumented survey and were passed between guidebooks and websites. Where a fall drops in several tiers over a long slope, one source may measure only the single largest plunge while another sums the whole cascade, producing figures that differ by hundreds of metres. GPS surveys, like the one used for Pachal, improve on eyeball estimates but still depend on where the team places the top and bottom points and on the accuracy of consumer devices.

There is also no national custodian of waterfall data. The Nepal Tourism Board promotes falls as destinations, provincial and local governments commission measurements for their own areas, and Wikipedia aggregates whatever citations exist. None of these is a definitive register, so competing numbers coexist. For readers, the safest approach is to quote heights as ranges with attribution — for example, "Pachal, reported at 356 to 381 m depending on source" — rather than asserting a single tallest-waterfall winner. This keeps the information useful for trip planning without overstating a precision the underlying data does not support.