You know the saying “lightning never strikes the same place twice”? Forget it. On a good night, one lake in Venezuela hosts thousands of lightning strikes every hour.

The phenomenon is known variously as the Beacon of Maracaibo, Catatumbo lightning or – cue dramatic roll of thunder - the “everlasting storm”. That last one might be a slight exaggeration but where the Catatumbo River meets Lake Maracaibo there is an average of 260 storm days per year.

Here the night sky is regularly illuminated for nine hours with thousands of flashes of naturally produced electricity.

Summer storms are familiar to many of us but along the equator, where temperatures are higher, skies rumble throughout the year. DR Congo in Central Africa is known as the thunderstorm capital of the world where the mountain village of Kifuka, with 158 lightning flashes per square kilometre each year, was thought to be the most electric place on Earth. That was until more detailed data was analysed.

In 2014, official figures from NASA revealed that the Brahmaputra Valley of far eastern India had the highest monthly lightning flash ratebetween April and May when thunderous activity ushers in the annual monsoon.

But Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for “highest concentration of lightning” with 250 lightning flashes per square kilometre each year. The storms ease off in the dryer months of January and February and are most spectacular at the peak of the wet season around October. At this time of year, you can see an average of 28 lightning flashes each minute.

Experts have sought reasons for the area’s uniquely intense storms for decades. In the 1960s it was thought uranium deposits in the bedrock attracted more lightning strikes. More recently, scientists suggested the conductivity of the air above the lake was boosted by the abundance of methane from oil fields below.

Neither theory has been proved though, so for now this record-breaking light show is attributed to a potent combination of topography and wind patterns.

“A lot of the [lightning] hotspots are tied to features in the terrain - slopes of mountain ranges, curved coastlines, combinations of those,” explains Dr Daniel Cecil from the Global Hydrology and Climate Centre’s lightning team.

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Complexity of nature.