Cotopaxi
Ecuador's near-perfect glaciated cone, among the world's highest active volcanoes
Rising in an almost flawless cone above the high Andean plateau south of Quito, Cotopaxi is the kind of volcano that landscape painters dream of: snow-capped, symmetrical and serenely beautiful, yet genuinely dangerous. At nearly 5,900 metres it ranks among the highest active volcanoes on Earth, its summit crater glittering with glaciers even though it sits almost on the equator. For the people of Ecuador's central valley it is both a national icon and a looming threat, for its ice cap is the source of catastrophic mudflows whenever the mountain stirs.
Cotopaxi stands in the Andes' Avenue of the Volcanoes, a corridor of towering peaks formed where the Nazca plate dives beneath South America. Its elevation of about 5,897 metres places it second among Ecuador's mountains, and its near-perfect shape reflects a long history of layered eruptions of ash and lava. The real hazard lies in its glaciers: when an eruption melts the summit ice, the meltwater mixes with ash to form lahars, fast-moving slurries that have repeatedly raced down its valleys toward populated areas. A major eruption in 1877 sent such flows more than 100 kilometres, devastating towns in their path.
Cotopaxi gives its name to a national park whose paramo grasslands shelter Andean condors, wild horses and the occasional puma, drawing trekkers and climbers from around the world. The mountain reawakened in 2015 with ash emissions that prompted evacuations and renewed monitoring, and milder unrest has recurred since. For Andean communities it carries deep significance, woven into Indigenous cosmology long before European climbers reached its summit in the nineteenth century. Today it is one of the most closely watched volcanoes in the Americas, its beauty and its menace inseparable.