Mount Stanley

Where is Mount Stanley?

Mount Stanley is part of the Rwenzori Mountains.

You will find it in: DR Congo, Uganda.

Summit: 0.386° N, 29.872° E

The story behind it

Old Greek maps told of snowy "Mountains of the Moon" near the source of the Nile, and when Europeans finally saw the Rwenzori the nickname stuck. Mount Stanley is the biggest block in that range, and its top, Margherita Peak, was first reached in 1906 by an Italian expedition led by Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, with the guides Joseph Petigax, Cesar Ollier and Joseph Brocherel; they named the peak after Queen Margherita of Italy. Climbing it means walking up through bamboo, then through a wet, mossy heather zone where giant groundsels and giant lobelias grow taller than a grown-up. Higher still comes rock, mud and, at last, ice. The ice is disappearing: in 1906 the Rwenzori had 43 named glaciers covering about 7.5 square kilometres, and by 2005 only around 1.5 square kilometres were left, spread over just three mountains. A survey found that the Stanley Plateau glacier lost close to thirty per cent of its surface between 2020 and 2024. Different surveys give different numbers, so every glacier figure is really just a snapshot of one moment.

Find it on the globe

Mount Stanley 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.