Mountain · Réunion
Piton des Neiges
The Piton des Neiges rises 3 070 m above the island of Réunion and is usually named as the highest point in the whole Indian Ocean. Its name means snow peak, yet snow almost never falls.
Picture credit: Dunog (Public domain) · Bozena Le Talludec (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Bbb (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Piton des Neiges?
Piton des Neiges is part of the Réunion Island (Mascarene Islands).
You will find it in: Réunion.
Summit: 21.098° S, 55.481° E
The story behind it
Réunion is the top of a volcano that grew up from the sea floor and pushed above the water roughly three million years ago. The Piton des Neiges built the island and then went quiet: its last eruptions happened somewhere between about 29 000 and 12 000 years ago. When the volcano's roof gave way and rivers cut into the soft rock, three enormous bowls were left around the summit, Mafate, Salazie and Cilaos, and people live and walk deep inside them. Snow up there is rare, on average about one day every three years, and the name is thought to come from a snowy spell in 1735, back when the mountain was still called the three Salazes. Most walkers sleep at the Caverne Dufour hut a few hundred metres below the top, set off in the dark and arrive for sunrise, when the mountain throws its own shadow across the sea. Its neighbour on the same island, the Piton de la Fournaise, is one of the busiest volcanoes on Earth, so Réunion carries a sleeping giant and a restless one at once. Heights of 3 070 m and 3 069 m are both printed, and the title "highest point in the Indian Ocean" is meant for islands, not for the sea floor; not every source accepts it.
Find it on the globe
Piton des Neiges 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 the Piton des Neiges?
About 3 070 m, and because it rises straight out of the sea its prominence is the same figure. No island summit anywhere in the Indian Ocean is known to be higher.
Where is the Piton des Neiges?
In the middle of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. The summit lies in the Réunion National Park, part of the UNESCO site Pitons, cirques and remparts, listed in 2010.
Why is it called snow peak if it hardly ever snows?
The mountain used to be known as the three Salazes. The name with the snow in it probably stuck after a cold, snowy spell in 1735, even though snow now falls up there only about one day in three years.
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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