Sajama

Where is Sajama?

Sajama is part of the Cordillera Occidental (Andes).

You will find it in: Bolivia.

Summit: 18.108° S, 68.883° W

The story behind it

Sajama is an extinct volcano shaped like a cone, wearing an ice cap above roughly 5 600 metres and rising from an Altiplano that already lies near 4 000 metres. On its lower slopes grows a woodland of queñua trees, Polylepis tarapacana, that reaches about 5 200 metres, the highest treeline known on Earth. The national park around it was created in 1939, the first in Bolivia, partly to look after those small twisted trees. Joseph Prem and Wilfrid Kuehm are usually credited with the first ascent in August 1939, although some accounts treat a 1946 climb as the first that is beyond dispute. In 1997 scientists drilled two long ice cores from the summit cap and read centuries of climate history out of the frozen layers. Older maps give the height as 6 572 metres, while modern surveys settle on 6 542 metres.

Find it on the globe

Sajama 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.