Mountain · Algeria
Mount Tahat
Mount Tahat rises 2 908 m in the Hoggar mountains of southern Algeria and is the highest summit in the whole of that vast country. It is the worn stump of an old volcano.
Picture credit: Olivier Morice (Public domain) · Yshak6.9 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Maurice, cap sur le Hoggar, de l'Atakor à la Taessa (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Mount Tahat?
Mount Tahat is part of the Hoggar Mountains (Ahaggar).
You will find it in: Algeria.
Summit: 23.289° N, 5.534° E
The story behind it
The Hoggar, also spelled Ahaggar, is a highland in the middle of the Sahara about 1 500 km south of Algiers, and most of its rock is roughly two billion years old. Younger volcanoes broke through in the part called the Atakor; erosion has since stripped their soft outsides away and left the hard plugs standing like towers, and Tahat is the tallest of them. Up here the desert behaves differently from the dunes: summer days are hot, but winter nights fall below freezing and snow on the peaks is possible. The Kel Ahaggar Tuareg live in this region, write with the Tifinagh alphabet and look after the tomb attributed to Tin Hinan at nearby Abalessa, while rock paintings in the Sahara, some around 6000 BC, show cattle and hunting from a time when there was far more water. Tamanrasset, the nearest town, lies about 56 km to the south, and on the same highland stands the Assekrem plateau at roughly 2 726 m, where the French priest Charles de Foucauld built a hermitage in 1911; monks still live there and travellers climb up for the sunrise. The surrounding Ahaggar National Park is one of the few places where the rare Saharan cheetah has been recorded. The first ascent of Tahat is usually dated to 1931, and the height itself is not settled: 2 908 m is the usual figure, but 2 918 m and even 3 003 m appear elsewhere.
Find it on the globe
Mount Tahat 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 Mount Tahat?
The usual figure is 2 908 m, the highest point in Algeria, though other sources give 2 918 m or 3 003 m. Its prominence of 2 328 m shows how far it stands above the desert around it.
Where is Mount Tahat?
In the Hoggar, or Ahaggar, mountains of the central Sahara in southern Algeria, about 56 km north of the town of Tamanrasset and inside Ahaggar National Park.
What is the Assekrem near Tahat?
A plateau in the same highland, roughly 2 726 m high, where the French priest Charles de Foucauld built a hermitage in 1911. A few monks still live there, and visitors climb up in the dark to watch the sun come over the rock towers.
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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