The Most Beautiful Mountains in the World

91 places in 46 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Mount Elbrus

   Russia43.353° N 42.438° E

   

   Elbrus is a volcano that stopped short of the main Caucasus ridge. It stands about ten kilometres north of the watershed that marks the border with Georgia, on the line between the Russian republics of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, and it rises higher than anything on that ridge: its western summit reaches 5,642 m, the eastern one 5,621 m. The two domes are separated by a broad saddle at about 5,416 m. By the common convention that draws Europe's southern boundary along the Caucasus crest, it is the highest mountain in Europe and one of the Seven Summits. The volcano is dormant, not dead: old lava flows on its flanks still look fresh, and hot springs and occasional gas vents persist.

   Did you know? In 1997 a Russian team spent 45 days hauling a Land Rover Defender to the eastern summit; it crashed on the descent and still lies below the top.

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2. 02 Mount Olympus

   Όλυμπος

   Greece · 24.7 km from Katerini40.083° N 22.350° E

   • biosphere reserve

   

   Mount Olympus, the home of the gods in Greek myth, is also a real and demanding mountain: a massif of some 52 peaks rising almost straight from the Aegean coast, with its summit, Mytikas, at 2,918 metres — the highest point in Greece. Seen from the town of Litochoro, the top of the mountain shows a V between two peaks of almost equal height: Mytikas on the left and Stefani, the Throne of Zeus, on the right, a sheer tooth that is the harder climb of the two.

   Did you know? Ancient pottery, coins and traces of sacrificial ash dated to around 400 BC have been found near the summit.

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3. 03 Mount Vesuvius

   Vesuvio

   Italy · 15.8 km from Naples40.823° N 14.429° E

   

   Vesuvius rises from the shore of the Gulf of Naples about 9 km east of the city, and its profile explains its history. What looks from Naples like a double-humped mountain is a young cone, the Gran Cono, sitting inside the broken rim of an older and once far taller volcano, Monte Somma, which collapsed in a series of huge eruptions. The main cone reaches 1,281 metres; the Somma ridge peaks at 1,132 metres at Punta Nasone, and between the two lies the valley of the Atrio di Cavallo. Volcanologists took the term somma volcano from here for any volcano with a caldera wrapped around a newer cone.

   Did you know? The 1906 eruption hit Naples so hard that Italy diverted its funds to reconstruction and the 1908 Olympic Games moved from Rome to London.

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4. 04 Puncak Jaya

   Indonesia4.083° S 137.183° E

   

   At 4,884 m, Puncak Jaya — also called Carstensz Pyramid, and Nemangkawi Ninggok, "peak of the white arrow", in the language of the Amungme people — is the highest mountain in Indonesia, the highest on any island on Earth and, for climbers who count New Guinea with Australia, the Oceania entry among the Seven Summits. It rises in the Sudirman Range of Central Papua, a bare limestone wall standing just a few degrees south of the equator.

   Did you know? Puncak Jaya is the highest point anywhere between the Himalayas and the Andes.

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5. 05 Aoraki / Mount Cook

   New Zealand43.595° S 170.142° E

   

   Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, rises to 3,724 metres in the Southern Alps, the range that runs the length of the South Island. It has three summits in a long, almost level ridge, Low Peak, Middle Peak and High Peak, which give the mountain a distinctive blocky profile seen from east or west. The Tasman Glacier flows down its eastern side and the Hooker Glacier lies to the south-west; the surrounding national park, established in 1953, has more than 140 peaks over 2,000 metres and 72 named glaciers, and together with three neighbouring national parks forms a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

   Did you know? The Australian climber Freda du Faur became the first woman to reach the summit on 3 December 1910.

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6. 06 Mount Rainier

   United States46.852° N 121.760° W

   

   On a clear day Mount Rainier floats over Seattle and Tacoma like a second horizon; locals simply call it "the Mountain". The volcano rises to about 4,391 metres, and because it stands alone above the lower Cascades it is the most topographically prominent peak in the contiguous United States. It also carries more ice than any other peak in the lower 48 states: 26 major glaciers and more than 90 km² of permanent snow and ice, including the Carbon Glacier, the largest by volume in the contiguous US, and the Emmons Glacier, the largest by area.

   Did you know? The ice-filled summit craters hold the world’s largest volcanic glacier cave network, with nearly 3.2 km of passages.

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7. 07 Nanda Devi

   India30.374° N 79.971° E

   

   Nanda Devi rises to 7,817 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand: the highest summit standing wholly inside India, and second in the country only to Kangchenjunga, which sits on the border with Nepal. The figure matters less than the shape of the ground around it. The mountain is a twin-summited massif, a ridge about two kilometres long running east to west, with the higher western top and a lower eastern one known locally as Sunanda Devi. On its south-western side it climbs more than 3,300 metres from the Dakshini Nanda Devi Glacier in barely four kilometres of horizontal distance, a profile as steep as that of K2. Around it runs an almost unbroken ring of peaks, twelve of them above 6,400 metres, enclosing the basin known as the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, whose one natural outlet is the narrow, deep Rishi Gorge draining west.

   Did you know? Nanda Devi counted as India's highest mountain until 1975, when Sikkim, and with it Kangchenjunga, became part of the Indian state.

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8. 08 Mount Everest

   Nepal27.988° N 86.925° E

   

   The border between Nepal and China runs straight across the top of Mount Everest, a summit in the Mahalangur Himal whose height was last fixed by a joint Nepali–Chinese survey in 2020 at 8,848.86 metres. No point on Earth stands higher above sea level. Nepalis call the mountain Sagarmatha; Tibetans call it Qomolangma, a name that already appears on a Qing imperial atlas of 1721. The English name came from Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, who honoured his predecessor George Everest, even though Everest himself protested that the natives of India could neither write nor pronounce it. The Royal Geographical Society adopted it anyway in 1865.

   Did you know? More than 200 bodies remain on the mountain because bringing them down from such altitudes is considered too dangerous.

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9. 09 Aconcagua

   Argentina32.653° S 70.012° W

   

   Aconcagua, at about 6,960 metres, is the highest mountain outside Asia and one of the Seven Summits — the high points of the seven continents. It stands in Argentina's Mendoza Province, about 15 km from the Chilean border and 112 km northwest of the city of Mendoza, protected within Aconcagua Provincial Park. Though it was once a volcano, activity ceased millions of years ago; the mountain owes its current height to tectonic uplift, and its rocks are old lavas and volcanic debris stacked over marine sediments.

   Did you know? In 1985 climbers found the frozen body of an Inca child, a ritual offering, buried at about 5,167 metres on a ridge of the mountain.

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10. 10 Sugarloaf Mountain

    Pão de Açúcar

    Brazil · 7.4 km from Rio de Janeiro22.949° S 43.157° W

    

    Sugarloaf Mountain is the rock that makes Rio's harbour instantly recognisable: a bare, rounded dome of gneiss rising 396 metres straight out of the sea at the mouth of Guanabara Bay. Its name was coined by the Portuguese in the 16th century, when refined sugar was shipped in tall conical clay moulds and the loaf that came out looked just like this peak. Geologists group it with the bornhardts — steep, isolated domes left standing as softer rock around them wore away — and it is one of a family of monoliths that rise from the water all around the city. The lower, wooded Morro da Urca stands beside it, and together the two hills form a natural monument, created in 2006, that protects a remnant of Atlantic forest clinging to their flanks.

    Did you know? The rock is augen gneiss about 600 million years old, formed long before South America and Africa split apart.

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11. 11 Eiger

    Switzerland46.578° N 8.005° E

    

    The Eiger is only 3,967 m high, lower than its neighbours the Mönch and the Jungfrau, but its north face is the most storied wall in the Alps. Rising almost 1,800 m of dark limestone and ice straight above the meadows of Grindelwald and Kleine Scheidegg, it is the largest north face in the Alps and one of the classic "trilogy" of Alpine north faces with the Matterhorn and the Grandes Jorasses. The mountain itself was first climbed on 11 August 1858 by the Irishman Charles Barrington with the Swiss guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren, by the west flank.

    Did you know? The name first appears as mons Egere in a property deed of 1252, and its origin is still disputed, from a farmer's name to a word for sharp.

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12. 12 Cotopaxi

    Volcán Cotopaxi

    Ecuador · 33.5 km from Latacunga0.681° S 78.438° W

    

    Cotopaxi is the volcano children would draw: a nearly symmetrical cone rising alone from a high Andean plain at about 3,800 m to 5,897 m, capped with one of the few glaciers on the equator. It stands in Cotopaxi National Park about 50 km south of Quito and is the second-highest summit in Ecuador after Chimborazo. On a clear day it is plainly visible from both Quito and Latacunga. At the top is a crater about 800 by 550 m and 250 m deep, with two concentric rims; the highest point lies on the outer rim to the north, and the ice begins at around 5,000 m.

    Did you know? In H. G. Wells's 1897 short story The Star, Cotopaxi erupts so violently that its lava reaches the Pacific coast within a single day.

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13. 13 Teide

    Spain28.273° N 16.644° W

    

    Teide, 3,715 m, is the highest point in Spain and the highest summit of any island in the Atlantic. Measured from the ocean floor it stands some 7,500 m tall, making it the third-largest volcanic structure on Earth after Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The cone rises from the Las Cañadas caldera, a vast horseshoe-shaped depression about 16 km across whose floor, at 2,000 to 2,200 m, is a desert of lava flows, pumice fields and wind-sculpted rock. The summit is a small cone, El Pitón, with a crater about 100 m wide; on the western flank rises its twin, Pico Viejo, with a much larger crater 800 m across.

    Did you know? The last eruption from Teide's summit happened around 850 AD and produced the Lavas Negras, the black flows that still cover much of its flanks.

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14. 14 Chimborazo

    Volcán Chimborazo

    Ecuador · 26.5 km from Guaranda1.469° S 78.817° W

    

    Chimborazo is Ecuador's highest mountain, an ice-capped stratovolcano of 6,263 metres in the western range of the Andes, and it holds a record no Himalayan peak can match. Because the Earth bulges at the equator and the mountain stands just one degree south of it, its summit is the point on the planet's surface farthest from the centre of the Earth: about 6,384 km, some two kilometres farther out than the top of Everest. Its last known eruption is thought to date to around AD 550.

    Did you know? In the 17th and 18th centuries Chimborazo was widely believed to be the highest mountain on Earth by any measure.

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15. 15 Mount Kailash

    People's Republic of China31.067° N 81.313° E

    

    Mount Kailash is a mountain that nobody climbs. The 6,638-metre peak in the Gangdise range of western Tibet is sacred to four religions, and the Chinese authorities forbid any ascent; there is no recorded successful climb. Reinhold Messner, offered the chance in the mid-1980s, reportedly turned it down. What people come for instead is the kora, a pilgrimage walk around its base, and the chance to see the mountain from every side.

    Did you know? In Tibetan the mountain is called Gang Rinpoche, roughly the precious jewel of snows, while its Sanskrit name may come from a word meaning crystal.

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16. 16 Mount Ararat

    Ağrı Dağı

    Turkey · 35.3 km from Artashat39.702° N 44.298° E

    

    Mount Ararat is a vast, dormant double volcano in the far east of Turkey, rising to about 5,137 metres from the plains near the borders of Iran, Armenia and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. Greater Ararat, a broad snow-capped cone, is the highest peak in Turkey; Little Ararat, 3,896 metres, stands beside it as a smaller, sharper cone, joined to it by a lava saddle at around 2,600 metres. The massif is about 35 km wide at its base, and because it rises so abruptly from low ground, it is one of the most visually commanding mountains in the world.

    Did you know? The massif covers about 1,100 square kilometres and holds roughly 1,150 cubic kilometres of volcanic rock, making it the largest volcano in the region.

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17. 17 Mount Robson

    Canada53.111° N 119.157° W

    

    Drivers on the Yellowhead Highway see Mount Robson the way few great mountains are ever seen: whole, from the valley floor to the summit, with nothing in front of it. At 3,954 m it is the highest point of the Canadian Rockies, and with 2,829 m of prominence it stands further above its surroundings than any other peak in the Rocky Mountains of North America. The south face rises in banded tiers of rock and snow above Kinney Lake, and the layered look is old enough to be in its name: in the Secwepemc language the mountain is Yexyexéscen, "striped rock". The English name most likely goes back to the fur trader Colin Robertson.

    Did you know? In the early 1900s the Robson Glacier fed both Berg and Adolphus lakes, straddling the Continental Divide and draining to both the Arctic and Pacific oceans.

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18. 18 Nanga Parbat

    Pakistan35.239° N 74.590° E

    

    Nanga Parbat, 8,126 m, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world and the western cornerstone of the Himalaya, rising just south of the great bend of the Indus in Gilgit-Baltistan, in the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir. Few mountains stand so far above their surroundings. On the south side the Rupal Face climbs about 4,600 m from its foot, often called the highest mountain face on Earth; on the north the Rakhiot flank rises some 7,000 m from the Indus in just 25 km. The name comes from Sanskrit for naked mountain, after the steep south face where snow rarely settles; locally it is Diamer, the mountain of God.

    Did you know? Guinness World Records lists it as the fastest-growing mountain on Earth, rising by about 7 mm a year.

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19. 19 Half Dome

    United States37.746° N 119.533° W

    

    Seen from the floor of Yosemite Valley, Half Dome looks as if a giant granite dome had been sliced cleanly in two and one half carried away. Three sides are smooth and rounded; the fourth, facing north-west, falls as a sheer, nearly vertical wall of pale rock. The summit stands at 8,846 feet (about 2,696 m), and at sunset the face catches the last light long after the valley has gone into shadow, glowing orange and then pink above the dark forest. The Ahwahneechee people, who lived in the valley, called it Tis-sa-ack, usually translated as "cleft rock".

    Did you know? The logo of the outdoor brand The North Face, designed in 1971, is a stylised outline of Half Dome.

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20. 20 Mount Kilimanjaro

    Tanzania · 30.3 km from Moshi3.067° S 37.359° E

    

    Kilimanjaro rises alone out of the plains of northern Tanzania, 5,895 metres high and some 4,900 metres above its own base. It is the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain on Earth, a dormant stratovolcano built by more than two million years of eruptions along the East African Rift. Three cones make up the massif: Shira in the west, the lowest at about 4,000 metres; Mawenzi in the east, a jagged ruin of pinnacles at 5,149 metres; and between them Kibo, the highest and largest cone. Kibo is only dormant. Its summit caldera still holds an inner cone, the Reusch Crater, and within it the Ash Pit, about 350 metres deep; fumaroles in the crater still release gas.

    Did you know? In 2014 the Swiss-Ecuadorian runner Karl Egloff reached the summit in under five hours and was back at the gate in about 6 hours 42 minutes in total.

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21. 21 Matterhorn

    Switzerland · 37.5 km from Sion45.976° N 7.659° E

    

    The Matterhorn is the mountain most people picture when they think of the Alps: a near-symmetrical pyramid of rock, 4,478 metres high, standing on the watershed between Switzerland and Italy. Its four steep faces point almost exactly to the four compass directions, separated by the Hörnli, Furggen, Zmutt and Lion ridges. Three faces are Swiss and the south face is Italian. The mountain looks down on Zermatt in the Swiss canton of Valais to the northeast and on Breuil-Cervinia in the Aosta Valley to the south; just to the east, the Theodul Pass has linked the two valleys as a trade route since Roman times.

    Did you know? The first woman to stand on the summit, Lucy Walker, reached it on 22 August 1871 climbing in a white print dress.

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22. 22 Mount Roraima

    Venezuela5.142° N 60.764° W

    

    Geologists call formations like this a tepui — "house of the gods" in the language of the Pemón, the Indigenous people who have lived around it the longest — and the name fits better than most translated place-names do. Roraima is less a peak than an island: a sandstone plateau roughly 31 square kilometres across, walled in on every side by cliffs that drop 400 metres more or less straight down. Whatever lives up there arrived by extraordinary means and then stayed, cut off from the surrounding lowlands for somewhere between 70 and 90 million years.

    Did you know? Three countries meet on the summit plateau: roughly 85% of it lies in Venezuela, 10% in Guyana and 5% in Brazil, with a marker at the tripoint.

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23. 23 Mount Fuji

    Japan · 34.7 km from Kōfu35.361° N 138.727° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Mount Fuji is an active stratovolcano on Honshu, and at 3,776 metres the highest mountain in Japan. Its nearly symmetrical cone, snow-covered for about five months of the year, stands about 100 km southwest of Tokyo and can be seen from the capital on clear days. It straddles the border of Shizuoka and Yamanashi prefectures, ringed by the towns of Gotemba, Fujiyoshida, Fujinomiya and Fuji. The last eruption, the Hōei eruption, began on 16 December 1707 and lasted into January 1708, opening a new crater and a secondary peak, Mount Hōei, halfway down the southeast flank and raining cinders and ash across the surrounding provinces as far as Musashi, home of Edo.

    Did you know? Everything above the eighth station belongs to the Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha shrine, a gift from the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1606.

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24. 24 Mont Blanc

    France · 36.6 km from Aosta45.833° N 6.865° E

    

    Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Europe outside the Caucasus, standing on the border between France and Italy. Its exact height is a moving target, because the summit is a cap of snow and ice that thickens and thins with the weather. Surveys have measured 4,810.02 metres in 2013, a low of 4,805.59 metres in 2023 after a long drought, and 4,807.3 metres in 2025; the rock summit beneath lies at about 4,792 metres, some 40 metres to the west of the ice top. Even the border is unsettled. France claims the whole summit under a treaty of 1796; Italy argues that the frontier follows the watershed, placing the top on the line; official Swiss maps mark the area around the summit as contested.

    Did you know? Marie Paradis became the first woman to reach the summit in 1808, thirty years before Henriette d'Angeville made the second female ascent.

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25. 25 K2

    Pakistan35.881° N 76.513° E

    

    K2 is 8,611 metres high, second only to Everest, and it sits deep in the Karakoram on the line between Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan and the China-administered Trans-Karakoram Tract of Xinjiang. Its name is a survey label that stuck. In 1856 Thomas Montgomerie of the Great Trigonometrical Survey sketched the two most prominent peaks he could see from Mount Haramukh, some 130 km to the south, and marked them K1 and K2, K for Karakoram. K1 turned out to have a local name, Masherbrum; K2 did not, probably because it is so remote that it cannot even be seen from Askole, the last village on the approach. Balti-derived Chogori and the surveyor's name Godwin-Austen have both been proposed, and neither has displaced the letters.

    Did you know? In 1986 an erroneous survey briefly suggested K2 might be taller than Everest; remeasurement the following year settled it firmly in second place.

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26. 26 Mount Etna

    Etna

    Italy · 28.9 km from Catania37.751° N 14.993° E

    

    Mount Etna rises on the east coast of Sicily between Catania and Messina, a volcano so large that its base measures about 140 km around and covers some 1,190 square kilometres. It is the highest mountain in Italy south of the Alps, but its height is never fixed: in 2021 the Southeast Crater reached 3,357 metres, and after the eruptions of 2024 the Voragine crater took over as the summit at around 3,403 metres. Etna is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, in an almost constant state of activity, and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in June 2013.

    Did you know? The whole volcano is creeping towards the Mediterranean at an average of about 14 millimetres a year.

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27. 27 Jade Dragon Snow Mountain

    People's Republic of China · 34.3 km from Lijiang27.098° N 100.175° E

    

    Jade Dragon Snow Mountain rises straight out of the high plateau of north-western Yunnan, a jagged crest that holds snow all year above the old town of Lijiang. Its highest summit, Shanzidou, reaches 5,596 metres, and the massif's prominence of over 3,200 metres ranks it among the ultra-prominent peaks of the world. To the Naxi people who live at its foot it is Mount Satseto; the Chinese name Yulong Xueshan means "jade dragon snow mountain", after the way the white crest seems to coil along the skyline.

    Did you know? The massif is often described as the southernmost mountain in Eurasia to carry snow all year round.

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28. 28 Kanchenjunga

    India27.703° N 88.147° E

    

    Kangchenjunga, 8,586 m high, is the third-highest mountain on Earth and, until surveyors of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India completed their calculations in 1849, was believed to be the highest of all. It stands on the border between Nepal and the Indian state of Sikkim, a huge massif whose main ridges intersect to form a giant cross, with four great glaciers radiating from the summit. Its five principal summits explain the Tibetan name, usually rendered as the five treasures of the high snow, and the local Lhopo people tell of treasures of salt, gold, turquoise, scripture, armour, grain and medicine hidden in the mountain, to be revealed when the world is in peril.

    Did you know? In 1905 the occultist Aleister Crowley led an attempt on the south-west side; an avalanche killed the climber Alexis Pache and three porters.

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29. 29 Belukha

    Russia49.807° N 86.590° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Belukha is the highest mountain of the Altai and of Siberia, a double-headed massif of ice on the border between Russia and Kazakhstan. Its eastern summit reaches 4,509 metres and the western 4,435 metres, joined by a snow saddle at about 4,000 metres; the Altai name Üch-Sümer, "three-headed", and the Kazakh Kadyn-Bazhy, "the head of the Katun", both describe the same great white bulk that dominates the Katun Range. The Russian name simply means "the white one", and it is always white: the massif carries some 169 glaciers covering around 150 square kilometres.

    Did you know? In 1935 a climbing instructor carried a barometer to the eastern summit and read 4,630 metres, more than 100 metres too high.

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30. 30 Mount Nyiragongo

    Nyiragongo

    Democratic Republic of the Congo · 18.2 km from Goma1.517° S 29.250° E

    

    Nyiragongo's crater holds the largest lava lake on Earth — a churning pool of molten rock roughly 1.2 kilometres across, so active it's been continuously molten since at least 1971, which makes it one of only a handful of persistent lava lakes anywhere in the world. Most volcanic craters are dry between eruptions; this one simply never stops.

    Did you know? At its fullest, before 1977, the lava lake was estimated to be as much as 600 metres deep.

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