Pico Bolívar

Where is Pico Bolívar?

Pico Bolívar is part of the Sierra Nevada de Mérida, Andes.

You will find it in: Venezuela.

Summit: 8.542° N, 71.046° W

The story behind it

Pico Bolívar rises above the city of Mérida in the Venezuelan Andes, and a cable car carries visitors most of the way up to neighbouring Pico Espejo at 4 880 metres — when it was built it was the world's highest and longest. The first people known to reach the summit, in January 1935, were Enrique Bourgoin, Heriberto Márquez Molina and the guide Domingo Peña, and they climbed over a small glacier called Timoncito. That glacier is gone. Ice that covered several square kilometres a century ago melted away peak by peak, and in 2024 the country's last remnant, on nearby Pico Humboldt, had shrunk so much that scientists stopped calling it a glacier at all — Venezuela became one of the first countries in modern times with no glaciers left. The mountain has also grown shorter on paper: surveys gave 5 002 metres in 1912 and 5 007 metres in 1928, while satellite measurements in 2002 settled on 4 978 metres, so the rock did not shrink, the measuring did. The summit bust was first a small plaster head carried up in 1935, replaced by a copper one in 1951 and by a brass copy in 1985. Standing beside it today, you look out over bare grey rock where climbers once strapped on crampons.

Find it on the globe

Pico Bolívar 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.