Qualla: Kintampo Waterfalls

Kintampo Waterfalls: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Acheampong, CC BY-SA 4.0. The sound arrives before the sight. Walking north from the town of Kintampo through increasingly thick forest, you hear the Pumpum River before you see what it does -- a cascade in three stages that drops roughly 70 metres through a crack in the Ghanaian interior, water plunging off laterite ledges into pools cold enough to shock. During the colonial era, the British called it Sanders Falls. The name did not stick. The water kept falling regardless of what anyone chose to call it, fed by a river that rises at Pumpumatifi and eventually feeds the Black Volta on its long arc through West Africa.

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Image: Stephen Acheampong | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kintampo Waterfalls: A Staircase into the Earth

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nkansahrexford, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kintampo Waterfalls unfolds in three distinct drops. The first two stages are gentle -- the path is level, the forest canopy thick overhead, the air noticeably cooler than the surrounding savanna. Then comes the descent: 173 stairs down along a rock face slick with mist, the roar...

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Image: Nkansahrexford | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kintampo Waterfalls: The Day the Tree Fell

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cdilalo47, CC BY-SA 4.0. On March 20, 2017, a storm tore through the forest above the falls. A large tree, its roots loosened by the saturated soil, toppled onto a crowd of visitors gathered near the water. Twenty people died — eighteen at the scene and two more at the hospital. Twenty-two others were pu...

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Image: Cdilalo47 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kintampo Waterfalls: A Walk Above the Canopy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abdul Rahman Abdul Kudus, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Kintampo reopened in 2019, the site had been transformed. Two canopy walkways now stretch above the forest -- one spanning 90 metres, the other 80 metres -- each engineered to support twenty people at a time. From these elevated platforms, visitors look down into the tree co...

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Image: Abdul Rahman Abdul Kudus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kintampo Waterfalls: Water, Trade, and the Interior

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Salim Mohammed chene, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Pumpum River that feeds Kintampo Waterfalls is a tributary of the Black Volta, one of the great waterways that shaped trade and settlement across the interior of what was once the Gold Coast. Kintampo itself sits near the geographic center of modern Ghana, a crossroads town w...

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Image: Salim Mohammed chene | CC BY-SA 4.0