The Most Beautiful Volcanoes in South America
7 places in 3 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful volcanoes in South America are Cotopaxi (Ecuador), Licancabur (Chile) and Chimborazo (Ecuador). The list covers 7 volcanoes in 3 countries. Chile has the most, with 4. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The Andes are a volcanic range as much as a mountain one. Along the Pacific edge of South America, the Nazca plate sinks beneath the continent, feeding a chain of volcanoes that runs from Colombia to Patagonia. In Ecuador they line up in two parallel rows along the highlands, a corridor Alexander von Humboldt helped make famous; in Chile and Bolivia they rise from the high desert of the altiplano; and in the Lake District farther south, they stand as snowy cones above forests and blue lakes.
Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world, is an almost perfectly symmetrical cone with a glacier cap visible from Quito on a clear day. Its neighbour Chimborazo is the highest mountain in Ecuador, and because of the bulge of the Earth at the equator its summit is the point on the planet's surface farthest from its centre. Licancabur rises above the high desert near San Pedro de Atacama with a small crater lake near its summit, one of the highest lakes in the world.
In the south, the volcanoes become landmarks of a gentler country. Osorno, often compared with Mount Fuji, rises in a white cone above Lake Llanquihue. Villarrica looms over the town of Pucón and is one of the few volcanoes in the world with an active lava lake in its crater. Lanín stands alone on the Argentine side of the range above monkey-puzzle forests, and Parinacota, paired with its twin Pomerape, is reflected in the still water of Lake Chungará.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cotopaxi | Volcano | Ecuador | |
| 2 | Licancabur | Volcano | Chile | |
| 3 | Chimborazo | Volcano | Ecuador | |
| 4 | Osorno Volcano | Volcano | Chile | |
| 5 | Villarrica Volcano | Volcano | Chile | |
| 6 | Lanín | Volcano | Argentina | |
| 7 | Parinacota | Volcano | Chile |
01 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.
02 Licancabur
Volcán Licancabur
Chile22.834° S 67.883° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the summit lies one of the highest lakes on Earth. The crater, around 400 to 500 metres across, holds a small freshwater pool of roughly 70 by 90 metres, a sheet of water sitting almost six kilometres up, in thin air under an intense high-altitude sun. The top of the mountain is also an archaeological site. Ceremonial platforms and stone enclosures stand on the eastern side of the crater, left by the Inca and the peoples before them, and at the north-eastern foot, around 4,600 metres, a waystation with more than a hundred structures and a plaza marks the route that pilgrims once climbed.
Did you know? Despite the altitude and intense ultraviolet light, the crater lake supports swarms of copepods, ostracods, water fleas and mats of cyanobacteria on its floor.
03 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.
04 Osorno Volcano
Volcán Osorno
Chile41.100° S 72.493° W
Draceane · CC BY-SA 4.0 The perfect cone stands on older foundations: Osorno is a stratovolcano built atop La Picada, a much-eroded volcano some 250,000 years old with a caldera six kilometres wide. Its own history has been restless: about eleven eruptions were recorded between the late sixteenth and the late nineteenth century, and one of them was watched by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle in January 1835, when the mountain was seen erupting from the coast of Chiloé. Local tradition in the Mapuche world knew it under several names, among them Peripillán, after a powerful spirit of the mountains. The summit was first reached in 1848.
Did you know? Indigenous peoples knew it by many names, including Purailla, Prarauque and Choshueco; Hueñauca and Guanauca were the most common by the mid-18th century.
05 Villarrica Volcano
Volcán Villarrica
Chile · 29.5 km from Villarrica39.420° S 71.939° W
Image by Quimantu from Pixabay The Mapuche call the mountain Ruka Pillañ, the house of the pillán, a powerful spirit of the volcanoes. Geologically it is a basaltic-andesitic stratovolcano of the upper Pleistocene or younger, built inside the remains of two older calderas that collapsed about 100,000 and 13,700 years ago; around 26 scoria cones dot its flanks, and the whole edifice covers some 400 km². Villarrica is the westernmost of three volcanoes aligned towards the Argentine border, followed by Quetrupillán and Lanín, and it straddles the boundary between the Araucanía and Los Ríos regions, between Lake Villarrica to the north and Lake Calafquén to the south.
Did you know? An eruption in 1562 scattered thin layers of ash as far as about 200 kilometres from the volcano.
06 Lanín
Argentina39.637° S 71.503° W
Rodrigo Yuraszeck · CC BY-SA 4.0 Geologically Lanín is the easternmost of a line of three large stratovolcanoes running northwest to southeast, with Quetrupillán in the middle and Villarrica at the far end; the alignment is thought to follow a fault beneath them. It is by far the quietest of the three in historical times. Its oldest known parts may go back to the Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene, and most of the volcano is built of basalt. When it last erupted is not known, though it is thought to have been within the last 10,000 years; a newspaper reported an eruption after the 1906 Valparaíso earthquake, but the report was later disputed.
Did you know? The Spanish explorer Basilio Villarino sighted the volcano in 1782, calling it Cerro Imperial and noting a different name used by local people.
07 Parinacota
Volcán Parinacota
Chile18.166° S 69.142° W
Gerd Breitenbach · CC BY-SA 3.0 The symmetry is deceptive, because Parinacota once lost a whole side of itself. Sometime between about 8,000 and 20,000 years ago its western flank collapsed, sending some 5-6 cubic kilometres of rock racing more than 20 km west across the plateau. The avalanche dammed the drainage and created Lake Chungará, which lies at about 4,517 m, one of the highest large lakes in the world. Its jumbled deposit, a field of hummocks up to 80 m tall, now cradles the Cotacotani lakes, a maze of small pools that feeds the headwaters of the Río Lauca. The cone we see today grew back afterwards, filling the scar.
Did you know? The shape of the deposit suggests the avalanche raced along at about 25 to 60 metres per second, fast enough to ride up over hills in its path.
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 volcanoes in South America?
- On our list, Cotopaxi (Ecuador) ranks first, followed by Licancabur (Chile) and Chimborazo (Ecuador).
- Which country has the most volcanoes in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Chile (4), Ecuador (2) and Argentina (1).
- Why is Chimborazo's summit the farthest point from the Earth's centre?
- The Earth bulges at the equator, so places near it sit farther from the centre than places at higher latitudes. Chimborazo lies just south of the equator, which puts its summit about two kilometres farther from the centre than the top of Everest.
- Is Cotopaxi an active volcano?
- Yes. Cotopaxi is one of the most active volcanoes in Ecuador, with a long record of eruptions, and it reawakened most recently in 2015 after decades of quiet.
- Which South American volcano has a lava lake?
- Villarrica in southern Chile is known for an active lava lake deep inside its summit crater, which makes it one of only a handful of volcanoes in the world with one.
- How many volcanoes are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 7 volcanoes in 3 countries. Chile has the most, with 4.
- Which is the highest of the volcanoes in South America?
- Parinacota (Chile) is the highest on this list, at 6,348 metres.