Route through the legendary mountains of six continents

Mountains have inspired religions, they have attracted ascetics and holy men, they have been a refuge for humans in difficult times, as well as a feared barrier that slowed their expansion. For most of their evolution, hominids avoided them, looking for underpasses to save those vertical and dangerous places. But the situation changed since the end of the eighteenth century and above all, with the arrival of Romanticism in the first half of the nineteenth. Suddenly, the mountains became the object of curiosity and conquest. For scientific, artistic purposes or as a mere physical and sporting challenge, man set out to conquer the highest mountains in the world. Alfredo Merino's book, who was a high mountain guide, and continues to be a great naturalist and popularizer with thousands of articles published in the best magazines,takes the reader into the exciting story of conquering the most legendary peaks on the planet. These are six of them:

Ruwenzori (Africa)

Although everyone thinks of Kilimanjaro when asked about a great African mountain, if there is a massif of legend on the black continent it is the Ruwenzori, the mountains of the Moon.

Today we know that it is a mountain range of more than 5,000 meters high located between Uganda and the Congo.

But since classical times it has figured in the imagination of travelers and geographers as enigmatic mountains of perpetual snow from which the Nile was born. This is how the great Ptolemy wrote it and it continued to be so for centuries.

The first European to see them was Henry Stanley, in 1905, another great in the history of exploration.

Its mysticism among mountaineers is caused by its inaccessibility.

That it is not due so much to the verticality of its walls but to the thick jungles, the torrential rains and the fog that always surround it.

South side view of Kailash.

Ernest Muldashev

Kailash (Asia)

This secluded silhouetted pyramidal mountain in the middle of the Tibetan plateau, towering up to 6,638 meters, is legendary for many reasons.

For Tibetans, Hindus, Jains and Sikhs, because it is their sacred mountain.

For geographers, because some of the largest rivers in Asia are born in its vicinity, from the Indus to the Karnali, the main tributary of the Ganges.

And for mountaineers and Himalayers, because it is the only Himalayan mountain of these characteristics that has never been climbed.

Nobody has trodden its summit, despite several attempts.

Its sacredness would make that ascension an affront to millions of believers.

Those who do make it to its base are pilgrims from all over the world to complete the

kora

, the pilgrimage going around the massif in an anti-clockwise direction.

"Everyone who performs the

kora

is freed from hell, because it cleanses the sins of the soul," explains Merino.

If you go around 13 times, you reach enlightenment.

Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas.

pixabay

Aconcagua (America)

Besides a beautiful name - "stone sentinel", in Quechua - Aconcagua is accompanied by other records, such as being the highest mountain in the Americas and the highest in the world, outside the Himalayas. A power of attraction among mountaineers magnified by the fact that their normal route is very simple, almost a mountaineering ascent, without any vertical, which attracts thousands of fans each year in search of its summit, at almost 7,000 meters (6,959 , to be exact). But the mirage is deceiving: the normal Aconcagua will be a steep path, but the altitude, the dryness, the violent and sudden storms and the low temperatures make this ascent a high risk activity. Even so, the superb panorama that can be seen from its summit, that world of hard and inhospitable stone that extends almost to infinity and that are the Andes,it makes that danger worth facing.

Aerial view of Uluru.

Dimageau

Uluru (Oceania)

Never has such a small mountain elicited such great attention. Uluru / Ayers Rock is a natural monolith (island of a single rock material that emerges solitary on a plain of different material) that rises just 348 above sea level in the central Australian desert. Its condition of island-mountain of striking red color always attracted the attention of the Australian aborigines, for whom it is a sacred place. As Alfredo Merino explains in his book, the irruption of mass tourism confronted the indigenous communities, who demanded the prohibition of the ascent to its peak, with the national government. After many efforts, on October 27, 2019 the path of ascent was definitively closed and “thus ended a long period of domination,disagreements and struggle to recover a cultural and symbolic heritage that had been thrown at the feet of the tourist mob ".

The perfect mountain, the Matterhorn (Matterhorn, in German).

Liridon

Matterhorn / Matterhorn (Europe)

The highest peak in Europe is Mont Blanc (4,810 meters), everyone knows it. But the most beautiful, the most photogenic, the perfect mountain is the Matterhorn (Matterhorn, in German). Not a landscaper would have imagined a monolith as superb as this one: four triangular faces, four perfect edges and a superb verticality up to 4,477 meters high. And on top of that, isolated and lonely in the heart of the Alps, to make it look better. Can a mountain ask for more to be hailed as the most beautiful on the globe? What is beautiful is dangerous, and fatal accidents have been numerous. A visit to the small cemetery in Zermatt confirms this. One of the most famous and tragic was precisely the one that reached the top for the first time: that of the British Edward Whymper,who crowned the Matterhorn / Matterhorn on July 16, 1865 with a cordate of seven, four of whom died on the descent.

Vinson, the top of Antarctica Wikipedia

Mount Vinson (Antarctica)

Antarctica is the icy continent, the most inhospitable and the hardest.

If climbing a 4,892-meter mountain in another part of the world is already a challenge, doing it 700 kilometers from the South Pole, where hurricane-force winds and extreme temperatures cancel out all kinds of life, is a heroism within the reach of very few humans.

And pockets, because an expedition here greatly multiplies the budget of any other mountaineering adventure.

The first ascent to Mount Vinson, the top of Antarctica, did not take place until 1966. The second occurred in 1979. And since then only 450 people have set foot on its summit.

Atlas of legendary mountains, Alfredo Merino, illustrations by Ignasi Font.

Posted by Geoplaneta.

144 pages, € 23.93

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