Maromokotro

Where is Maromokotro?

Maromokotro is part of the Tsaratanana Massif.

You will find it in: Madagascar.

Summit: 14.023° S, 48.966° E

The story behind it

Maromokotro is the high point of a whole island, so its prominence is the same as its height: 2 876 metres. The mountain sits inside the Tsaratanana Reserve in northern Madagascar, and the nearest towns, Bealanana and Ambanja, are more than two days of travel away. The rock belongs to an old volcanic massif, but today it is the forest that decides who gets through. A team of botanists from Kew Gardens set out from the village of Mangaindrano and walked into rainforest on their second day, through a real bamboo forest with climbing bamboos that grow nowhere else. The ground under the moss turned out to be rotten, ravines had to be crossed by hanging on to dead tree-fern trunks, and after about ten days they turned back roughly 12 kilometres short of the summit. People here say that whoever does reach the top leaves a white rooster there as a gift. No first ascent has ever been written down, which is unusual for a country's highest mountain.

Find it on the globe

Maromokotro 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.