59 Fun Facts About Andes

By which measure do the Andes beat every other mountain range on land?

Length: the Andes run the whole western edge of South America, farther than any other range on land. Only the mid-ocean ridge on the sea floor forms a longer chain.

Which country holds the north-eastern end of the Andes, beyond Colombia?

Venezuela holds the range's north-eastern tail, the Sierra Nevada de Mérida, where the country's last glacier shrank so far that scientists reclassified it as an ice field in 2024.

What is the highest peak in the Andes, and in all the Americas?

Aconcagua began as a volcano but fell silent long ago, so the highest point in the Western Hemisphere, just inside Argentina, is no longer counted as one.

Which Ecuadorian volcano's summit is the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's centre?

Chimborazo sits about one degree from the equator, where Earth bulges outward, so its summit stands roughly 2 km farther from the planet's centre than Everest's.

What is the world's highest volcano, on the Chile-Argentina border?

Ojos del Salado has no confirmed eruption in recorded history, yet fumaroles near its summit still vent volcanic gas.

The subduction of which tectonic plate beneath South America is the main cause of the Andes' rise?

The Nazca Plate, a slab of Pacific sea floor, dives under South America's western edge, lifting the range and powering its earthquakes and volcanoes as it sinks.

Which Chilean city gives its name to the 1960 earthquake that is the strongest ever recorded?

Valdivia's 1960 earthquake reached magnitude 9.5, and its tsunami crossed the Pacific to cause destruction in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

What name is given to the vast high plateau of the central Andes, most of it in Bolivia?

The Altiplano is a run of enclosed basins between the two main Andean chains, so its rivers never reach the sea and the water pools in lakes or dries into salt flats.

On which lake do the Uros people live on floating islands built from totora reeds?

Titicaca's Uros build with totora twice over: the islands are thick mats of the dried reed, and bundles of the same reed are lashed together into their boats.

Which seat of government, about 3,650 m up in the Andes, is the world's highest national capital?

La Paz fills a deep canyon cut into the surrounding high plain, which shelters it from the cold winds above; Bolivia's constitutional capital is lower-lying Sucre.

Which city, spread over a high plain about 2,640 m up, is the largest in the Andes?

Bogotá began as a Spanish town founded in 1538 by the conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who had climbed into the Andes and conquered the Muisca people of the high plain.

Which metal comes out of Chuquicamata and Escondida, the giant mines of Chile's northern desert?

Copper ore formed along the western Andes where hot fluids rose from cooling magma, and in 2024 Chile still mined more of it than any other country.

Which Bolivian salt flat, the largest on Earth, sits on brine that holds vast quantities of lithium?

Salar de Uyuni is so large, flat and bright that satellite sensors are calibrated against it, and a thin film of rain turns the whole surface into a mirror.

Which Bolivian mountain city boomed on silver dug from Cerro Rico, the 'rich hill' that rises above it?

Potosí sprang up after silver was found on Cerro Rico in 1545, and the hill is still honeycombed with mine workings from its summit down.

The Andean tree Cinchona is the original source of which drug?

Quinine from cinchona bark was for centuries the only effective treatment for malaria, so prized that Dutch and British collectors smuggled the tree's seeds out to plantations in Asia.

Which staple crop was first domesticated in the Andes, where thousands of native varieties are still grown?

The potato was first domesticated in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, and Spanish ships carried it to Europe in the 16th century, where it became a staple a world away from home.

The tropical Andes hold a greater variety of which animals than any other region on Earth?

Amphibians are more varied here than anywhere else, and most of the region's frogs live nowhere else, among them marsupial frogs whose females carry their eggs in a pouch on the back.

How does the Andean condor, one of the world's largest flying birds, stay airborne for hours at a time?

Riding rising air off warm ground and windy slopes lets a bird that can weigh 15 kg glide for hours with barely a wingbeat: one condor carrying a flight recorder flew for more than five hours without a single flap.

The Andean condor is what kind of bird?

A vulture, the condor lives mainly on carrion rather than hunting, and its featherless head stays cleaner when it is buried in a carcass.

Which wild Andean camelid produces some of the finest and most expensive wool in the world?

The vicuña is still rounded up from the wild, sheared and released, much as it was under the Inca, who reserved its fleece for their nobility, and each animal gives only a little wool.

Which two camel relatives did Andean peoples domesticate for carrying loads and for fleece?

The llama and the alpaca split the work: the big llama is first of all a pack animal, the smaller alpaca is kept for its fleece, and both spit when annoyed.

Which soft-furred rodents of the Andes were hunted almost to extinction for their pelts?

Chinchillas were hunted almost to extinction for their thick, velvet-soft fur, and while they are still scarce in the wild they are now bred in captivity and sold as house pets.

Which large threatened mammal shares the Andean cloud forests with mountain tapirs?

The spectacled bear is South America's only bear, and it builds stick platforms in the branches to reach food and to sleep.

Which conquistador seized the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 with fewer than 200 men?

Francisco Pizarro ambushed the emperor's escort and took him prisoner, accepted a room filled with treasure as ransom, and then had Atahualpa executed anyway.

Which Inca site, perched on a saddle above the Urubamba valley, did Hiram Bingham bring to world attention in 1911?

Machu Picchu was no secret to the people living below it, and it was a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, who led Bingham up to the ruins that made him famous.

What are the two main surviving language families of the Andean peoples?

Quechua and Aymara are the living voices of the highlands: the Inca made Quechua the language of their empire, and it has long outlived that empire, still spoken by millions today.

The word cordillera, used for the Andean chains, comes from a Spanish word meaning what?

Rope is the root: cordillera grew from the old Spanish cordilla, a little cuerda or cord, which suits a range that looks like peaks strung along a line.

Which desert on the Andes' western flank is the driest non-polar desert on Earth?

The Atacama stays dry because the Andes block moist air from the east while the cold current offshore chills the sea air, so the coast gets fog and low cloud but almost no rain.

Why has NASA-style research been done in the Yungay area of Chile's northern desert?

In 2003 researchers repeated the Viking landers' life-detection tests on Yungay soil and found nothing.

The 1897 expedition that first climbed the Americas' highest peak put which of its members on the summit first?

The mountain guide, Matthias Zurbriggen of Switzerland, reached the top alone, while expedition leader Edward FitzGerald turned back on every one of his own attempts.

Which nationality's 1934 expedition first climbed the east side of the Americas' highest peak, naming a glacier route?

Polish climbers reached the top by a new line up the eastern side in 1934, and the ice they crossed has carried the name Polish Glacier ever since.

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes in 1972, carried which sports team?

Rugby union players from Montevideo's Old Christians Club chartered the air force plane for a match in Santiago and filled the spare seats with friends and family to help cover the cost.

For how many days were the survivors of Flight 571 stranded in the Andes?

The 72 days ran from the crash on 13 October 1972 to the last airlift on 23 December, and they included an avalanche that buried the fuselage and killed eight people as they slept.

Which two survivors of Flight 571 walked out of the mountains to fetch help?

Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa walked until they met herdsmen on the far bank of a roaring river, and got their message across by wrapping a note around a rock and throwing it.

Which 2023 Spanish-language film retold the story of the Andes flight disaster?

Society of the Snow had its actors spend time with the living survivors and with the families of the dead, so that each knew the person he was playing.

Which mountain pass is the main road crossing of the Andes between Argentina and Chile?

Los Libertadores carries the main road between Mendoza and Santiago through a tunnel under the border, and heavy winter snow can still shut the crossing.

Bolivia has been landlocked since Chile seized its only coastal province in which conflict?

The War of the Pacific began as a quarrel over a tax on nitrate, the desert mineral sold as fertiliser, and ended with Chile holding the whole coast that Bolivia had owned.

Which range across the Drake Passage is thought to be a continuation of the Andes?

The Antarctic Peninsula's mountains are joined to the tip of South America by a long looping undersea ridge, and many geologists regard them as the same chain carried on across the water.

Which Chilean port sits at the sharp bend in South America's west coast, where the Andes turn from northwest to south?

Arica sits in the crook of the bend, just south of the Peruvian border, and geologists link the curve to the same squeezing of the crust that built the widest stretch of high plateau inland.

Visitors arriving in Cusco are often greeted with a cup of coca tea to ease what?

Altitude sickness is what the welcome cup is meant to ward off, though the evidence is thin, and a 2022 study of travellers to Cusco found the tea drinkers were no less likely to fall ill.

Which endangered high-altitude trees, known locally as Queñua, grow higher than almost any other trees?

Found at up to 4,500 m, perhaps only 10% of the original woodland survives, and birds like the royal cinclodes depend on it.

Yanacocha, a vast open-pit mine in the mountains near Cajamarca in northern Peru, is worked chiefly for which metal?

Gold has been poured at Yanacocha since 1993, in the hills above the very town where the captive Inca emperor Atahualpa once offered to fill a room with it as ransom.

The snow line in the Andes does not peak at the equator, so where is it highest?

In arid northern Chile so little snow falls that the line sits far higher than it does on the equator, because permanent snow needs moisture as well as cold.

The tall, thin spikes called penitentes, which crowd high slopes in the dry Andes, are made of what?

Hardened snow blades slowed Charles Darwin's cargo mules on his 1835 crossing, and on one column he saw a frozen horse stuck as if on a pedestal, its hind legs in the air.

Which shallow lake, once the second largest in Bolivia, had dried up almost entirely by the end of 2015?

Poopó was seldom more than 3 m deep, so drought and the diversion of its water for mines and farms were enough to empty it, and it had dried up before, most recently in 1994.

Apart from its extreme dryness, Chile's northern desert is thought to hold which record among the world's deserts?

The oldest, a title Africa's Namib also claims: its core has been dry for millions of years, and a 2018 study found that when freak rains pooled there, most of the soil's microbe species perished in the sudden flood.

One leading theory derives the name Andes from the Quechua word anti, which means what?

East is what anti meant in Antisuyu, the eastern quarter of the Inca Empire as seen from Cusco, though the origin of the name is disputed and some dictionaries prefer a word for a high crest.

Which river rises high in the Peruvian Andes yet crosses almost the whole continent to reach the Atlantic?

The Amazon gathers its headwaters in the Peruvian Andes, and geologists think the region's drainage once ran the other way, until the rising mountains helped turn it toward the Atlantic.

Which peak in the Cordillera Blanca, at 6,768 m, is the highest mountain in Peru?

Huascarán lost part of its north side in the 1970 earthquake, and the avalanche of ice and rock buried the Peruvian town of Yungay in the valley below.

Three frozen Inca children, sacrificed about 500 years ago, were found near the summit of which Andean volcano?

Llullaillaco's freezing summit kept the three so well preserved that tests on the eldest girl's hair showed she had been given more and more coca and alcohol in her final months.

Which find high in the Andes showed Darwin the rocks were once seabed?

Fossil shells so delighted Charles Darwin that he forgot the thin air: locals recommended onions for the breathlessness, he wrote, but he found nothing so good as the shells.

Why does a long stretch of central Chile's Andes lack active volcanoes?

A flat sinking plate shuts off the magma: beneath this stretch the ocean plate slides in almost level instead of diving steeply, and the volcanoes there died out millions of years ago.

Which Argentine port, backed by the Andes on Tierra del Fuego, bills itself as the world's southernmost city?

Ushuaia has the title by most counts, although Chile's Puerto Williams, a far smaller town across the Beagle Channel, lies farther south and claims it too.

In one dry stretch of Chile's Andes, what is reckoned to hold more frozen water than the visible ice?

Rock glaciers are creeping tongues of rubble with ice buried inside, and that stony blanket insulates the ice, so it is slower to respond to warming than a bare glacier.

Puya raimondii, the towering 'Queen of the Andes', is a giant relative of which fruit?

The pineapple family includes this giant, which grows for 40 to 100 years, flowers a single time on a spike several metres tall, and then dies.

Which small animal, a household pet elsewhere, has been raised for meat in the Andes for thousands of years?

The guinea pig, known in the Andes as cuy, was bred there for the table long before traders carried it to Europe in the 16th century, where it became a pet.

Bolivia's highland soldiers struggled in the heat of the lowland Chaco during a 1930s war against which neighbour?

Paraguay won nearly every major battle and took most of the Chaco, though Bolivia held on to its oil fields at the foot of the Andes.

Which protein-rich seed crop, native to the high Andes, tolerates frost and salty soil?

Quinoa is cooked like a grain but is no true cereal: the plant is a relative of spinach, and its young leaves can be eaten the same way.

Which metal became the principal product of mining in the Bolivian Andes in the 20th century?

Tin took over from silver as the ore that paid, and it turned Simón Patiño, who started out in a humble job in the mining trade, into the 'Tin King' who came to control about half of the country's output.