Zugspitze

Where is Zugspitze?

Zugspitze is part of the Wetterstein Mountains, Eastern Alps.

You will find it in: Germany.

Summit: 47.421° N, 10.985° E

The story behind it

On 27 August 1820 the surveyor Josef Naus, his assistant Maier and the mountain guide Johann Georg Tauschl waded through deep snow to the top, and that is the first ascent anybody wrote down. Thirty-one years later a gilded iron cross was carried up in pieces and put together on the eastern summit; the cross standing there today is a replacement 4.88 metres tall, regilded in 2009. The border between Germany and Austria runs straight over the western summit, so a few steps can take you from one country into the other. Just below the summit lies the Northern Schneeferner, the largest glacier in Germany, which measured about 27.9 hectares in 2013 and keeps getting smaller. The nearby Southern Schneeferner shrank so much that in 2022 it was no longer counted as a glacier at all. Since 1900 a weather station on the summit has recorded wind, snow and air without a break, which makes it one of the longest weather diaries in the Alps. Today a cog railway and cable cars bring hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to a place that once cost Naus two hard days of walking.

Find it on the globe

Zugspitze 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.