Mount Tabwemasana

Where is Mount Tabwemasana?

Mount Tabwemasana is part of the Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu.

You will find it in: Vanuatu.

Summit: 15.363° S, 166.755° E

The story behind it

Espiritu Santo is the biggest island of Vanuatu, about 3955 square kilometres of rainforest, rivers and hills, and Tabwemasana stands near its western coast. There is no road to the mountain: walkers take a boat from the village of Tasiriki along the shore to Kerepua, then follow a river upstream before turning off for the steep climb. A guide is essential, because the path is faint and quickly swallowed by the forest, and in a typical year fewer than six people stand on the summit. Kerepua itself used to sit on the flanks of the mountain, a full day's walk above the sea, until the villagers moved down to the coast in the late 1970s. One tree, Metrosideros tabwemasanaensis, is known only from this mountain and grows nowhere else on Earth. More than thirty different languages are spoken on Espiritu Santo, and the island is also home to the rare Santo mountain starling. Since the peak is the highest ground on an island, its prominence is the same as its height, 1 879 metres.

Find it on the globe

Mount Tabwemasana 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.