Mountain · Kenya
Mount Kenya
Mount Kenya stands almost exactly on the equator and at 5 199 metres it is the highest mountain in the country that took its name. Glaciers sit on top.
Picture credit: Ruud Zwart (CC BY-SA 2.5 nl) · Shyamal (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Mount Kenya?
Mount Kenya is part of the Solitary extinct volcano in the Kenyan highlands.
You will find it in: Kenya.
Summit: 0.151° S, 37.307° E
The story behind it
Mount Kenya is the highest mountain in Kenya and the second highest in Africa, after Kilimanjaro. It is what is left of an extinct volcano that formed around three million years ago and once stood roughly 7 000 metres high; ice ground the soft outer cone away until only the hard rock plugs of the inside were left. The two sharpest summits are called Batian and Nelion, after the Maasai laibon Mbatian and his brother Nelieng, while the lower Point Lenana carries the name of Mbatian's son Lenana. The names were suggested by Halford Mackinder, who in September 1899 became the first to stand on Batian, together with the guides César Ollier and Josef Brocherel. Nelion had to wait until 1929, when Percy Wyn-Harris and Eric Shipton climbed it. Eleven small glaciers still cling to the mountain right on the equator, but they are shrinking fast and researchers expect them to be gone by about 2050. The country's name comes from the mountain: the Kamba word Kĩĩ-Nyaa, mountain of the ostrich, was written down by missionaries around 1849 as Kenya.
Find it on the globe
Mount Kenya 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.
Questions children ask
How high is Mount Kenya?
Batian, the main summit, reaches 5 199 metres, which makes Mount Kenya the second highest mountain in Africa, about 700 metres below Kilimanjaro.
Where is Mount Kenya?
In central Kenya, about 150 kilometres north-east of Nairobi, sitting almost on the equator inside Mount Kenya National Park.
What grows high up on Mount Kenya?
Above the bamboo forest come giant lobelias and giant groundsels, odd plants several metres tall that look like something from another planet.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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