Following the Steps of Giants

In June 1802, Alexander von Humboldt attempted to climb Cotopaxi but was forced to turn back. Seventy years later, on November 28, 1872, the first recorded ascent was finally achieved by German geologist Wilhelm Reiss and Colombian scientist Ángel Escobar.

Cotopaxi (from Quechua “Neck of the Moon”) is one of the world’s highest active stratovolcanoes, rising 5,897 meters above sea level in Ecuador’s Andes. Its near-perfect cone, cloaked in snow, dominates the páramo—the vast windswept highland plain. Both feared and revered, Cotopaxi embodies majesty and fragility at the heart of the Andean landscape.

Before this immense mountain, in the silence of the páramo, the experience was sublime— a fleeting glimpse of the infinite.