Mountain · Martinique
Mount Pelée
Mount Pelée is the highest mountain on Martinique, a volcano whose eruption of 1902 handed volcanology two words it still uses. Its name means bald.
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Where is Mount Pelée?
Mount Pelée is part of the Lesser Antilles volcanic arc, northern Martinique.
You will find it in: Martinique.
Summit: 14.817° N, 61.167° W
The story behind it
Mount Pelée stands at the northern end of Martinique and is the island's highest mountain. Its name is French for bald, because the upper slopes carried no forest. On 8 May 1902 the volcano erupted and destroyed Saint-Pierre, at that time the island's biggest town. What raced down the slope was not lava but a cloud of glowing gas, ash and rock fragments, and the French geologist Alfred Lacroix, who studied it, gave it the name nuée ardente, glowing cloud. Since then volcanologists call this kind of dome-building eruption Peléan, a technical word that comes straight from this mountain. From October 1902 a huge tower of stiff lava grew inside the crater, sometimes by up to fifteen metres a day, until it became unstable and collapsed in March 1903. Sources disagree on the exact height: many give 1 397 metres, while the Smithsonian volcano database lists 1 372 metres.
Find it on the globe
Mount Pelée 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 Pelée?
About 1 397 metres, the highest point on Martinique, though the Smithsonian database gives 1 372 metres. A volcano's summit can change when a lava dome grows or falls apart.
Where is Mount Pelée?
In the north of Martinique, a French island in the Lesser Antilles of the eastern Caribbean, with the town of Saint-Pierre at its foot.
Is the volcano watched today?
Yes. A volcano observatory was set up on Martinique in 1903, only the second in the world, and since December 2020 it has recorded more small earthquakes, so the alert level stands at yellow.
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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