Dufourspitze

Where is Dufourspitze?

Dufourspitze is part of the Monte Rosa massif, Pennine Alps.

You will find it in: Switzerland.

Summit: 45.937° N, 7.867° E

The story behind it

Monte Rosa is not one mountain but a whole crowd of summits, and the Dufourspitze is the tallest of them. On old Swiss maps it was simply called Höchste Spitze, highest peak, and also Gornerhorn. In January 1863 the Swiss Federal Council gave it a new name, after Guillaume-Henri Dufour, the engineer who directed the first accurate map of the whole country and who also helped to found the Red Cross. The first ascent happened on 1 August 1855, and it took a party of eight: Charles Hudson, John Birkbeck, the brothers Christopher and James Smyth and Edward Stephenson, with the Zermatt guides Matthäus and Johannes Zumtaugwald and Ulrich Lauener. Its prominence is 2 165 metres, which means you would have to walk down that far before you could find anything higher, seventh place in the Alps. Sources give the height as 4 634 metres or as 4633,9 metres, which is the same measurement rounded two different ways. In the whole of the Alps, only Mont Blanc is higher.

Find it on the globe

Dufourspitze 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.