Over Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, storms flash up to 260 nights a year — so reliably that sailors steered by them for centuries. Nobody fully agrees why the lightning concentrates right here.
Where the Catatumbo River meets Lake Maracaibo, lightning flashes on a nightly schedule — the highest concentration of strikes measured anywhere on the planet.
A crisp explainer on the geography that traps warm, moist air over the lake night after night, building thunderclouds like clockwork.
Explorer George Kourounis travels to Lake Maracaibo to stand beneath the storm and film the lightning up close.
The Royal Meteorological Society breaks down the lake breeze, the Andean winds, and the record-setting strike density.
For centuries sailors steered by the glow — the 'Lighthouse of Maracaibo' — and legend says its flashes once gave away a nighttime invasion fleet.
Flash counts, the methane and uranium theories, and the time the storm briefly went dark in 2010 — the quirks that make it so strange.
A documentary portrait of the phenomenon, the people who live beneath it, and the science still trying to explain it.