List
The most famous high mountains in the world
Mount Everest tops this list with 8 849 m. K2 comes second. Here are the top 24, each one a link to its own page.
| # | Name | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Everest Mahalangur Himal, Himalayas | 8 849 m |
| 2 | K2 Karakoram | 8 611 m |
| 3 | Kangchenjunga Kangchenjunga Himal, Himalayas | 8 586 m |
| 4 | Aconcagua Principal Cordillera, Andes | 6 961 m |
| 5 | Denali Alaska Range | 6 190 m |
| 6 | Cotopaxi Andes, Cordillera Real | 5 897 m |
| 7 | Mount Kilimanjaro East African Rift volcanoes | 5 895 m |
| 8 | Mount Elbrus Caucasus Mountains | 5 642 m |
| 9 | Popocatépetl Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt | 5 393 m |
| 10 | Vinson Massif Sentinel Range, Ellsworth Mountains | 4 892 m |
| 11 | Puncak Jaya Sudirman Range | 4 884 m |
| 12 | Mont Blanc Graian Alps, Mont Blanc massif | 4 808 m |
| 13 | Matterhorn Pennine Alps | 4 478 m |
| 14 | Mauna Kea Hawaiian volcanic chain | 4 207 m |
| 15 | Eiger Bernese Alps | 3 967 m |
| 16 | Mount Fuji Fuji Volcanic Zone | 3 776 m |
| 17 | Mount Etna | 3 403 m |
| 18 | Mount Olympus Olympus massif | 2 918 m |
| 19 | Half Dome Sierra Nevada | 2 696 m |
| 20 | Mount St. Helens Cascade Range | 2 549 m |
| 21 | Mount Kosciuszko Snowy Mountains, Great Dividing Range | 2 228 m |
| 22 | Ben Nevis Grampian Mountains | 1 345 m |
| 23 | Table Mountain Cape Fold Mountains | 1 085 m |
| 24 | Uluru | 863 m |
What is being measured here
Height is measured from sea level to the summit. That sounds simple until you meet a mountain whose top is an ice cap that grows and shrinks each year, or one measured three times by three surveys that disagree by a few metres. Where that happens, the mountain’s own page says so.
The two ends of this list are further apart than they look: Mount Everest is about 10 times the figure for Uluru, and Uluru is still inside the top 24 of the whole world.
How to read this list
Read the list from the top down. The left column is the rank, the middle one is the name — every name is a link to a page that explains the place for children — and the right column is the figure the ranking is built on. Nothing here is rounded to make a nicer story: if two entries are close together, they are genuinely close together.
Only countries that are members of the United Nations are ranked, so the list does not mix countries with territories that belong to another country. That is a choice, not a rule of nature, and a different atlas may well count differently.
Questions children ask
Which is the most famous high mountain?
Mount Everest is first on this list.
Where do the numbers in this list come from?
They come from public datasets, named at the bottom of this page, and the ranking is calculated from them rather than copied from another list. Where a figure is genuinely disputed, the page for that place says so.
How many entries are on this list?
This list shows 24, ordered by real figures from the datasets named at the bottom of the page.
Where these numbers come from
Areas, coastlines and neighbours from the ISO 3166 dataset; population from the World Bank (2018); mountain and river figures checked individually. Ranks are calculated, not copied.
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