The One-Minute Geographer: The Andes
Continuing our series on Latin America, we’ll start this overview of Latin America’s mountains by asking how they compare to other mountains we’re more familiar with. For example, Denali in Alaska (20,300 feet) is the tallest mountain not just in the United States, but in all of North America. Are any of the Andes Mountains taller than Denali? The answer is yes, and the number may surprise you. There are 44 mountains in the Andes chain taller than Denali! One is Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, the tallest mountain in the world outside of the mountains in and around the Himalayas of central Asia. Mount Aconcagua is about 22,800 feet compared to Everest’s 29,000 feet. There are 900 peaks in South America that are taller than 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) — that’s taller than Mt. Whitney in California, the tallest mountain in the 48-state USA (14,500 feet, about 4,420 meters) and taller than Mt. Blanc in Europe, about 15,770 feet (4,800 meters).
But are you ready for this? There’s a mountain in the Andes, Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which is taller than Everest! I’ll explain below. In this post I don’t want to overwhelm you with statistics about elevation, although I’ll mention a few rounded figures in feet and meters as I did above. Details are available in the chart near the end of this post.
