luogo con piu fulmini al mondo perche

The place with the most lightning in the world is Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela: up to 297 thunderstorms a year

In the world, many like to boast about local records: from natural spectacles such as the waterfalls highest in the world to less high-sounding records exploited to give fame to events or small towns. There are, however, more “mysterious” records, which throughout history have inspired legends and fascinated travellers. The “Catatumbo’s Relámpago“, a natural phenomenon typical of the Lake Maracaibo in Venezuelais certainly among the latter: the night storms light up the sky up to 297 days a yearmaking the area the place with the most lightning in the world.

Over the centuries, legends and theories more or less scientific have tried to explain why the area is so plagued by storms: the local indigenous people they attributed them to the souls of the deceased oh supernatural fireflieswhile in more recent times it has been thought to methane fumes of the lake or to the presence of uranium underground, but without finding any evidence of it.

The real causes of the Relámpago would in fact seem simpler, and common to others “lightning hotspot” as the Lake Victoria In Africa.

The presence of a large body of water, heated during the day from the Sun, leads to theincrease in temperature and humidity in the air during the day, causing it to rise again; the presence of mountainous reliefs (in this case, a part of the Andes mountain range) allows you to develop a intense circulation with a colder breezewhich descends towards the lake. I convective motions thus developed they generate disturbances very localized, supplying them with energy with peaks of activity in the afternoon and evening.

Lake Victoria shares this particular geography, consisting of high peaks and large bodies of water downstream; in the African continent they are in fact present 6 of the world’s 10 hotspotsconcentrated in the East African Rift Valley where are The African Great Lakes.

The first written testimonies of the phenomenon are linked to an attempt at night assault to the city of Maracaibo in 1595, by the fleet of Sir Francis Drake. As also narrated in the poem within the poem “The Dragontea” by Lope de Verga, the action was in fact thwarted by lightningwhich allowed the defenders of the city to spot the ships before the attack preparing the counteroffensive.

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Constant flashes of lightning often illuminate the waters of Lake Maracaibo, sometimes protecting the city from unwelcome visitors… (Source: Fernando Flores, Flickr)

A similar fate was suffered, centuries later, by the attempted assault of the Spaniards against Simon Bolivar’s fleetIn the 1823during the Venezuelan War of Independence. It can be said, without exaggeration, that Relampago has shaped the history of the city, if not of the entire nation.