Mountains

The world's most famous mountains

224 mountains, each with its own page: where it stands, how it came to be and what makes it special.

Continent

Country

How these mountains were chosen

There are far more than 224 mountains worth knowing, so this is not a ranking of the highest — it is a spread. The tallest are here, but so is the one shaped like a tooth that everybody recognises, the one that is a volcano still capable of erupting, the flat-topped one standing alone above a desert, and the one that is the tallest on Earth if you start measuring at its base on the sea floor rather than at the water's surface.

Every height on these pages is measured from sea level to the summit, and where three surveys disagree by a few metres, the page says so instead of picking one quietly. Each mountain also stands on the globe with a shape that matches what it actually is — a sharp horn, a long ridge, a volcanic cone, a broad shield — rather than the same grey triangle repeated.

Every one of them stands on the globe

These pages are not only a list: every entry here has a place on the spinning globe, at its real coordinates. From far away the planet is a plain blue ball — detail only arrives as you zoom in, and then each of these is standing exactly where it belongs.

It works the other way round too: whatever you click on the globe opens its page, and every page links back to that exact spot on the globe. You can wander from a map into a text and back again without ever using the search box.