The Most Beautiful Mountains in South America
12 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful mountains in South America are Aconcagua (Argentina), Sugarloaf Mountain (Brazil) and Cotopaxi (Ecuador). The list covers 12 mountains in 7 countries. Argentina has the most, with 4. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South America is framed by the Andes, the longest continental mountain range on Earth, pushed up where the Pacific plate dives beneath the continent. That collision built a spine of glaciated volcanoes and high plateaus from Venezuela to Patagonia, and its dry northern deserts left mineral-rich rock exposed in bands of red, ochre and green. To the east, the ancient Guiana and Brazilian shields add something entirely different: sheer table mountains and granite domes far older than the Andes.
Aconcagua, in Argentina, is the highest summit in the Americas. Ecuador's Cotopaxi is a near-perfect glaciated cone, and nearby Chimborazo, thanks to the bulge of the Earth at the equator, has the summit farthest from the planet's centre. In Patagonia, the Cuernos del Paine wear dark caps of sedimentary rock over pale granite, while the Puna of Argentina holds the Cono de Arita, a symmetrical dark cone standing alone on the white Salar de Arizaro.
Colour is a theme of its own. Peru's Vinicunca, the Rainbow Mountain, is striped by layers of mineral sediment, and in Argentina's Quebrada de Humahuaca the Serranía de Hornocal and the Cerro de los Siete Colores show the same geology in zigzags and bands. Mount Roraima rises as a flat-topped tepui with cliffs on every side, and Colombia's Cerros de Mavicure lift bare granite from the rainforest. Rio de Janeiro has two of the world's most famous city mountains: Sugarloaf at the mouth of Guanabara Bay and Corcovado beneath the statue of Christ the Redeemer.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aconcagua | Mountain | Argentina | |
| 2 | Sugarloaf Mountain | Mountain | Brazil | |
| 3 | Cotopaxi | Volcano | Ecuador | |
| 4 | Chimborazo | Volcano | Ecuador | |
| 5 | Mount Roraima | Tepui | Venezuela | |
| 6 | Serranía de Hornocal | Mountain | Argentina | |
| 7 | Vinicunca (Rainbow Mountain) | Mountain | Peru | |
| 8 | Corcovado | Mountain | Brazil | |
| 9 | Cerros de Mavecure | Mountain | Colombia | |
| 10 | Cerro de los Siete Colores | Mountain | Argentina | |
| 11 | Cuernos del Paine | Mountain | Chile | |
| 12 | Cono de Arita | Mountain | Argentina |
01 Aconcagua
Argentina32.653° S 70.012° W
Image by magicaltravelling from Pixabay For mountaineers its appeal is that the normal route from the north is not technically difficult: no ropes or ice climbing are strictly needed. The difficulty is altitude. At the summit, air pressure is about 40 percent of sea level, most climbers suffer from altitude sickness to some degree, and around three people die on the mountain in an average year. Only an estimated 30 to 40 percent of those who set out reach the top. The first recorded ascent was made on 14 January 1897 by the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen, part of Edward FitzGerald's expedition; the Polish Glacier on the east side was first climbed in 1934, and the vast South Face in 1954.
Did you know? Aconcagua is the highest peak in both the Southern and the Western Hemispheres.
02 Sugarloaf Mountain
Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.4 km from Rio de Janeiro22.949° S 43.157° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay The summit is reached by one of the world's oldest passenger cableways. Engineer Augusto Ferreira Ramos conceived it in 1907; German-made equipment was hauled up the rock by hand and on steel cables, and the first section, from Praia Vermelha to Morro da Urca, opened in 1912 — the first cable car in Brazil. Two stages carry visitors up: first to the 220-metre top of Urca, then across a 1,400-metre span to Sugarloaf, in bubble-shaped glass cars that give a full circle of views. The first cabins were of wood and ran for 61 years; the cars were replaced in 1973 and again in the late 2000s.
Did you know? The city of Rio de Janeiro was founded on 1 March 1565 on the narrow strip of land at the foot of Sugarloaf.
03 Cotopaxi
Volcán Cotopaxi
Ecuador · 33.5 km from Latacunga0.681° S 78.438° W
Image by tvtommyec from Pixabay It is also one of the most active volcanoes in the country, with 87 known eruptions since the first recorded one in 1534. The worst came in 1742, 1744, 1768 and 1877. In the 1877 eruption pyroclastic flows melted the entire ice cap, and mudflows ran more than 100 km to the Pacific and into the Amazon basin; the colonial town of Latacunga was flattened more than once. The 1742 eruption was watched by Pierre Bouguer and Charles-Marie de La Condamine of the French Geodesic Mission. Renewed steam and ash explosions came in 2015, and another eruptive phase began in October 2022.
Did you know? The NASA tracking station on its slopes, with a staff of about 75, later followed Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle before its equipment moved to Dakar, Senegal.
04 Chimborazo
Volcán Chimborazo
Ecuador · 26.5 km from Guaranda1.469° S 78.817° W
Dabit100 / David Torres Costales Riobamba · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountain rises some 2,500 metres above highlands that already lie at 3,500–4,000 metres, on a base about 20 km wide, and on a clear day it can be seen from Guayaquil on the coast. The summit area has four tops, named Whymper, Veintimilla, Politécnica and Nicolás Martínez, and glaciers that reach down to about 4,600 metres on the northeast feed rivers for the surrounding provinces. For generations local ice-cutters, the hieleros, have carried blocks of glacier ice down to the markets of Riobamba and Guaranda. The Quichua name is often explained as "the snow on the other side", and local tradition calls the mountain Taita, father, with nearby Tungurahua as Mama.
Did you know? Chimborazo appears on Ecuador's coat of arms, with a river flowing from its base that represents the Guayas.
05 Mount Roraima
Venezuela5.142° N 60.764° W
Tinhojv · CC BY-SA 4.0 That isolation shows in the biology. Around 35% of the species found on Roraima's summit are endemic — found nowhere else on the planet — including carnivorous plants and frogs that never developed the ability to survive outside this one plateau. Crossing the top, past black quartz formations and pools scoured into bare rock, feels less like hiking and more like visiting a separate planet's biosphere that happened to form on this one.
Did you know? The plateau's sandstone is Proterozoic, deposited some 1.7 to 2 billion years ago, and is made almost entirely of silica grains.
06 Serranía de Hornocal
Argentina · 24.3 km from Humahuaca23.262° S 65.123° W
Image by fedelubomillan from Pixabay The colours come from the rock itself. The range exposes the Yacoraite Formation, a sequence of limestones and sandstones laid down along muddy shores and in shallow seas at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago; the boundary between the age of dinosaurs and the age that followed runs through its upper layers. Across the region the same beds preserve dinosaur footprints, fossil eggs and stromatolites. Later, when the Andes rose, the strata were tilted and folded, and erosion carved them into the serrated pattern that now stands on end against the sky.
Did you know? The summits of the range reach 4,761 metres, about 400 metres above the viewpoint.
07 Vinicunca (Rainbow Mountain)
Vinicunca
Peru13.870° S 71.303° W
Image by jerzykwpodrozy from Pixabay Each band is a different kind of rock. The pink comes from red clays, muds and sands, the white from quartz-rich sandstone and marl, the deep red from claystones loaded with iron, the green from phyllites rich in iron and magnesium, the brown from a coarse conglomerate containing magnesium, and the mustard yellow from sulphur-bearing calcareous sandstones. Because the layers lie side by side across the slope, the whole sequence can be read in a single glance.
Did you know? Visitor numbers exploded within a few years: from a few dozen people a month around 2015 to roughly a thousand or more a day in the 2019 high season.
08 Corcovado
Brazil · 5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.953° S 43.212° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay The statue of Christ the Redeemer was built between 1922 and 1931 after a campaign by the Catholic Circle of Rio, funded mainly by donations from Brazilian Catholics. The Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa led the project, the French sculptor Paul Landowski created the figure, the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida modelled the face, and the French engineer Albert Caquot designed the reinforced-concrete structure. The figure is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its arms span 28 metres, and its outer layer is soapstone, chosen for durability. Opened on 12 October 1931, it is the world's largest Art Deco sculpture and was voted one of the New 7 Wonders of the World.
Did you know? The line is one of the few railways still powered by three-phase current through two overhead wires, tackling gradients of up to 30 percent.
09 Cerros de Mavecure
Colombia3.466° N 67.976° W
Gicaman · CC BY-SA 4.0 The hills are monoliths of very old crystalline rock, outliers of the Guiana Shield, the Precambrian basement that underlies much of north-eastern South America and also forms the tepuis and inselbergs of Venezuela and Guyana. Here the Inírida, a tributary in the Orinoco basin, winds past them through seasonally flooded forest and savanna, and the area around the hills was designated a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2014. The summit of Pajarito has been reached only rarely, by climbing expeditions in 1992 and 2015.
Did you know? Geologists describe the rock as a deformed igneous rock with a porphyritic texture, often referred to simply as granite.
10 Cerro de los Siete Colores
Argentina23.747° S 65.504° W
Augusto Sarita · CC BY-SA 3.0 The colours record a long and restless geological history. Marine sediments laid down when the region lay under the sea, then lake beds and river deposits, were lifted and buckled by the same tectonic forces that raised the Andes, and fossils in the rock bear witness to those changes. The tints come from the minerals: greens from copper-bearing shales, whites from limestone, reds and pinks from iron-rich clays and sandstones, yellows from sulphurous calcareous rock. The oldest bands are said to be hundreds of millions of years old, the youngest only a few million.
Did you know? The bands do not lie in one tidy sequence: faults and angular unconformities have shuffled them, so layers of very different ages sit side by side.
11 Cuernos del Paine
Chile51.002° S 73.012° W
Image by jmarti20 from Pixabay The two-tone look is a geological snapshot. Around 12 to 13 million years ago a body of magma pushed up and spread sideways between layers of older mudstone and sandstone, cooling into granite and gabbro-diorite; the heat baked the surrounding sediments into dark metamorphic rock. Erosion later stripped away most of the covering layers, leaving the dark remnants perched on top of the granite. Dating of the intrusion shows that the whole body of magma was emplaced and crystallised in a geologically brief span of roughly 160,000 years, which is why the contact between light and dark is so clean and sharp.
Did you know? Uranium-lead dating of crystals in the granite gives ages of about 12.5 million years.
12 Cono de Arita
Argentina25.018° S 67.729° W
Ben Stubbs · CC BY 2.0 Its regularity has generated a small mythology. The cone is often described as a volcano that never erupted, or as the most perfect natural cone in the world, and local tradition holds that it served as a ceremonial site before the Inca. Geologists tell a plainer story. Argentina's official geological map of the Antofalla sheet shows the hill as a remnant of early Miocene volcanic deposits, its lower part made of volcanic material and its summit capped by a slightly younger ignimbrite, the welded deposit of a hot ash flow. The rocks that once surrounded it have been worn away, leaving a solitary erosional relic in the middle of much younger Holocene salt.
Did you know? The salt flat around the cone lies at about 3,460 metres above sea level.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful mountains in South America?
- On our list, Aconcagua (Argentina) ranks first, followed by Sugarloaf Mountain (Brazil) and Cotopaxi (Ecuador).
- Which country has the most mountains in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Argentina (4), Brazil (2) and Ecuador (2).
- What is the highest mountain in South America?
- Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes, at about 6,961 metres. It is the highest mountain outside Asia and the highest in both the Western and Southern Hemispheres.
- Why is Chimborazo's summit the farthest point from the centre of the Earth?
- The Earth bulges at the equator, and Chimborazo stands just south of it in Ecuador. Although it is far lower than Everest above sea level, its summit is about two kilometres farther from the planet's centre.
- Why is Rainbow Mountain in Peru so colourful?
- Its slopes are made of layered sediments with different minerals, such as iron oxides that give red and other compounds that give yellow and green tones. Erosion has exposed the layers in parallel stripes.
- How many mountains are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 12 mountains in 7 countries. Argentina has the most, with 4.
- Which is the highest of the mountains in South America?
- Aconcagua (Argentina) is the highest on this list, at 6,962 metres.