Pico Duarte

Where is Pico Duarte?

Pico Duarte is part of the Cordillera Central.

You will find it in: the Dominican Republic.

Summit: 19.023° N, 70.998° W

The story behind it

Pico Duarte sits in the middle of the Cordillera Central, the rocky backbone of the island of Hispaniola. In 1851 the German-British consul Robert Hermann Schomburgk made the first recorded climb and called the summit Monte Tina. Under the dictator Rafael Trujillo the mountain was renamed Pico Trujillo; after his death it took the name of Juan Pablo Duarte, a founder of the country, whose bronze bust now stands at the top. How high it really is was argued over for a long time: figures of 3 087, 3 098 and even 3 175 metres circulated before a satellite survey in 2021 settled on 3 101 metres. Up there you walk through Hispaniolan pine forest, not palm trees, and on winter nights the temperature drops below freezing. The massif is where the country's two most important rivers start, the Yaque del Norte and the Yaque del Sur. Depending on the route, the walk up takes two to five days, and mules usually carry the luggage.

Find it on the globe

Pico Duarte 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.