🇵🇪 Peru · The Highlands and the Andes
Nevado Huascarán is the roof of Peru and one of the most imposing mountains in the Americas: its south summit reaches 6,768 meters, making it the highest point in the country, in the northern Andes and in the entire tropical belt of the planet. It dominates the Cordillera Blanca from the province of Yungay, in Áncash, and gives its name to Huascarán National Park, which protects almost the whole range. It has two summits -the south (6,768 m) and the north (6,654 m)- separated by a glacier pass known as La Garganta.
For the vast majority of travelers, Huascarán isn't a mountain 'to climb' but one 'to look at': it's the permanent backdrop of the Callejón de Huaylas and shows up on almost every trip in the area, from the Llanganuco lakes to Laguna 69. Only experienced mountaineers, well acclimatized and with a professional guide, attempt the summit, on technical expeditions that mean crossing glaciers, dodging crevasses and spending several days at extreme altitude.
Huascarán also carries a painful memory: in the 1970 earthquake, the avalanche that buried the city of Yungay broke off from its north face. Today that history sits alongside the admiration for the mountain. Anyone visiting the area can get close to its lower slopes through the Llanganuco sector, explore the park and, with luck and a clear sky, see it in all its glory. For any activity at altitude, acclimatizing in Huaraz beforehand is essential.
Huascarán gives its name to Huascarán National Park, created in 1975 and declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985. Its north summit was first reached in 1908 by a US expedition that included the mountaineer Annie Smith Peck; the south summit, the higher of the two, was conquered in 1932 by a German-Austrian expedition. In 1970, an earthquake shook loose from its north face the avalanche that destroyed Yungay, in one of the greatest tragedies in Peruvian history. More detail on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The region of the snow-capped summits: between the Cordillera Blanca —the highest in the tropics— and the Callejón de Huaylas, home to Huascarán, to the temple of Chavín, to the avalanche that buried Yungay and to turquoise lakes.
Read the history of Áncash →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Huascarán (also called Mataraju in Quechua) is the highest mountain in Peru: its south summit reaches 6,768 meters above sea level. That figure makes it not only the roof of the country but the highest point in the northern Andes and in the entire tropical belt of the Earth. Across South America it is also one of the highest mountains, behind giants such as Aconcagua.
The massif actually has two main summits: the south, at 6,768 m, and the north, at 6,654 m, separated by a glacier col known as La Garganta. It rises in the province of Yungay, in the Áncash region, right at the heart of the Cordillera Blanca, the highest tropical mountain range in the world. From the Callejón de Huaylas, the valley at its feet, Huascarán dominates the horizon and has become the natural symbol of the whole region.
Its name is associated with Huáscar, one of the Incas who fought his brother Atahualpa for power, though the exact origin of the place name is disputed. Beyond the etymology, for the people of Áncash Huascarán is far more than a mountain: it's a constant presence, a point of reference and a source of water, since its glaciers feed rivers and lakes across the whole basin.
Because of its height and difficulty, Huascarán was for a long time a challenge for mountaineers. The first summit reached was the north, the lower of the two, on 2 September 1908, by a US expedition in which the mountaineering pioneer Annie Smith Peck stood out, one of the great women of exploration of her time.
The south summit, higher and technically more demanding, took longer to fall. It was conquered on 20 July 1932 by a joint German and Austrian expedition, which opened the route to the true roof of Peru. From then on, Huascarán established itself as one of the great objectives of mountaineering in South America, drawing climbers from all over the world to the Cordillera Blanca.
Today the climb is still a serious undertaking, reserved for mountaineers with experience, good acclimatization and the support of professional guides. The normal route starts from the village of Musho and requires crossing glaciers, negotiating crevasses and spending several days at high camps. Climate change, which has sped up the retreat of the glaciers, has made some sections more unstable, so extra caution is called for.
The history of Huascarán is marked forever by the tragedy of 31 May 1970. That day, an earthquake of magnitude close to 7.9 shook the Áncash region. The shaking broke off from the west face of Huascarán's north peak a gigantic mass of ice and rock -hundreds of meters wide, from a height of between 5,600 and 6,200 meters- that swept down the valley as a devastating avalanche.
The avalanche reached estimated speeds of between 200 and 500 kilometers per hour and, despite the natural barriers that in theory protected the area, completely buried the city of Yungay and flattened the town of Ranrahirca. In Yungay alone around thirty thousand people died; the survivors were a mere handful, many of them saved because at that moment they were on the cemetery hill or in the stadium, slightly higher ground. It was the deadliest glacier-collapse disaster ever recorded.
Today, over what was Yungay, the Campo Santo is preserved: a place of memory where barely the tops of a few palm trees from the old square and the outline of some remains show above ground, in a silent landscape at the foot of the same mountain. Huascarán thus embodies two faces: the imposing beauty that draws travelers from all over the world and the memory of one of the greatest catastrophes in Peru's history.
The 1970 tragedy was not the first time the north face of Huascarán had come down on the valley. Eight years earlier, on 10 January 1962, a block of ice from the north glacier gave way and produced an avalanche that flattened the town of Ranrahirca and several neighboring settlements, killing some 4,000 to 5,000 people. Smaller in scale than the 1970 catastrophe, that disaster had already shown clearly how dangerous the north face of the massif was.
After the 1962 avalanche, specialists and authorities discussed preventive measures, including the possibility of moving the city of Yungay to a safer area, given that it lay in the path of possible future collapses. Those warnings, however, did not translate into an actual relocation of the population before the far greater tragedy of 1970, which repeated -on a much more devastating scale- the same pattern of geological risk.
This precedent is key to understanding the magnitude of what happened in 1970: it was not an unforeseeable event in the abstract, but the enlarged repetition of a phenomenon the mountain itself had already shown it could produce. Later studies of glaciers and geological risk in the Cordillera Blanca, including monitoring programs for glacial lakes that could generate outburst floods (known as GLOFs), intensified after these two tragedies.
Partly in response to the need to manage and protect a territory of high geological risk and enormous natural value, in 1975 the Peruvian state created Huascarán National Park, which covers much of the Cordillera Blanca and protects both Huascarán itself and dozens of peaks, glaciers, lakes and valleys of the Áncash region. The park became an early model of a high-mountain protected area in South America, combining the conservation of puna ecosystems and queñual woods with the management of glacier-related risk.
International recognition came in 1985, when UNESCO declared Huascarán National Park a World Natural Heritage Site, in view of its exceptional scenic beauty, its biodiversity and the presence of the highest tropical mountain range on the planet. That recognition reinforced both the environmental protection of the area and its standing as an international destination for trekking and mountaineering.
Today the National Service of Natural Protected Areas (SERNANP) runs the park, regulates entry through paid tickets and works with local communities and travel agencies on the sustainable management of a territory that combines extraordinary beauty with natural hazards that science continues to study closely, especially in the context of the accelerating retreat of the glaciers due to climate change.