Pico da Neblina

Where is Pico da Neblina?

Pico da Neblina is part of the Serra da Neblina, part of the Serra do Imeri in the Guiana Highlands.

You will find it in: Brazil.

Summit: 0.805° N, 66.007° W

The story behind it

For a long time nobody outside the forest knew that Brazil's highest mountain existed, because clouds sat on it nearly every day and the rainforest around it is enormous. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace glimpsed distant mountains here in the 1850s, but the peak was properly spotted only in 1952, from an aeroplane. In 1965 the surveyor José Ambrósio de Miranda Pombo climbed it while mapping the border with Venezuela, and the summit turned out to lie just 687 metres inside Brazil. Its height has been corrected several times: the old barometer reading of 3 014 metres became 2 993.78 metres with GPS in 2004 and then 2 995.30 metres in 2016, when gravity was taken into account, so books printed in different decades disagree. The Yanomami, whose land this is, call the mountain Yaripo, usually translated as mountain of the winds, and they consider it sacred. Visitors were kept away for nineteen years and may come again since 2022, but only in groups of up to ten and only with Yanomami guides. On its wet slopes live frogs found nowhere else on Earth, whose closest relatives split off more than 45 million years ago.

Find it on the globe

Pico da Neblina 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.