Cerro Chirripó

Where is Cerro Chirripó?

Cerro Chirripó is part of the Cordillera de Talamanca (Talamanca Range).

You will find it in: Costa Rica.

Summit: 9.484° N, 83.489° W

The story behind it

The name Chirripó comes from an Indigenous word meaning land of eternal waters, and the mountain lives up to it: streams and small lakes lie all around the summit. Those lakes were hollowed out by ice during the last ice age, and the ice is long gone. Above the forest the trees simply stop and a cold, open landscape called páramo begins, with tough grasses and low shrubs. The lowest temperature ever measured in Costa Rica, about minus nine degrees, was recorded up here; snow has not fallen for roughly a hundred years, but hail still does. The first documented ascent was in 1904 by Agustín Blessing Presinger, a German missionary, although people may well have stood on the summit before that. Today the climb runs about 15 kilometres and gains some 3 000 metres, so almost everyone sleeps a night in the mountain refuge inside Chirripó National Park, which was founded in 1975. Sources put the height at 3 819, 3 820 or 3 821 metres, depending on who measured.

Find it on the globe

Cerro Chirripó is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.