The Most Spectacular Summits in the World

26 places in 17 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 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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2. 02 Mount Fitz Roy

   Monte Fitz Roy

   Argentina49.271° S 73.043° W

   

   Few mountains are shaped as purely for looking at as Fitz Roy. Its granite tower, 3,405 metres high, stands on the border between Argentina and Chile in southern Patagonia, within Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park, and it rises in sheer, smooth walls well above the ice fields and spires that surround it. Its older name, Chaltén, comes from the Tehuelche language and means "smoking mountain" — clouds form so often around the summit that it seems to be steaming. The Argentine explorer Francisco Moreno renamed it in 1877 after Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle, who had charted this coast in the 1830s.

   Did you know? Yvon Chouinard, who climbed the mountain's Southwest Ridge in 1968, went on to found the Patagonia clothing company; teammate Douglas Tompkins had co-founded The North Face.

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3. 03 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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4. 04 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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5. 05 Weisshorn

   Switzerland · 31.9 km from Sion46.102° N 7.716° E

   

   Among the four-thousanders of the Swiss Alps, the Weisshorn is the one climbers most often name as the most beautiful. At 4,505 metres it rises between the Mattertal, the valley that leads up to Zermatt, and the Val d'Anniviers to the west, and its form is almost geometric: a pyramid of three sharp ridges meeting at a pointed summit, with steep glaciated faces between them — the Bis, Schali and Weisshorn glaciers. From almost every direction the top appears white, which is where the name comes from. Geologically it is the culminating point of the Dent Blanche nappe, one of the great thrust sheets of the Pennine Alps; most of the mountain is gneiss, with younger sedimentary rock on the west face.

   Did you know? The village of Randa lies about 3,100 metres below the summits of the Weisshorn and the Dom, which face each other across the Mattertal.

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6. 06 Kirkjufell

   Iceland64.948° N 23.311° W

   

   Kirkjufell, "Church Mountain", rises 463 metres straight out of the shoreline on the north coast of the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland. It is not high, but it stands alone, and from most angles it reads as a single steep cone with a slightly bent tip — the shape that has made it, by common claim, the most photographed mountain in the country.

   Did you know? Danish sailors once knew the peak as Sukkertoppen, the Sugar Top, after the tall cones in which refined sugar used to be sold.

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7. 07 Aiguille du Midi

   France · 36.8 km from Aosta45.879° N 6.888° E

   

   The Aiguille du Midi is a 3,842-metre rock needle in the Mont Blanc massif, and one of the few places in the Alps where anyone can stand face to face with the high mountains without climbing. Its name means "needle of midday". From the summit the view takes in Mont Blanc to the south, a whole horizon of peaks and glaciers, and, straight down, the rooftops of Chamonix more than two and a half kilometres below.

   Did you know? The rock needle was first climbed on 4 August 1818 by the Polish count Antoni Malczewski with Jean-Michel Balmat and five other guides.

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8. 08 Pic du Midi d'Ossau

   France42.843° N 0.438° W

   

   Few mountains are as instantly recognisable as the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. At 2,884 metres it is far from the highest summit in the Pyrenees, but it stands alone at the head of the Ossau valley, a dark, split tooth of rock visible from the streets of Pau some 50 kilometres away, and it has become the emblem of the French side of the range. From the north it shows two horns, the Grand Pic and the Petit Pic (2,812 m); walk round to the south and two more points appear, the Pointe d'Aragon and the Pointe Jean-Santé. The people of Béarn call it affectionately Jean-Pierre, Jan-Pè in the local language — by one explanation, the elder son and the younger.

   Did you know? In exceptionally clear weather the peak can be seen from the Dune du Pilat on the Atlantic coast, nearly 200 kilometres away.

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9. 09 Machhapuchhre

   Nepal · 32.7 km from Pokhara28.495° N 83.949° E

   

   Machhapuchhre, the "fish's tail" in Nepali, is the mountain that defines the skyline of Pokhara. At 6,993 metres it is lower than its neighbours in the Annapurna massif, but it stands at the end of a long spur thrust south from the main range, rising almost straight out of low, green foothills. That enormous vertical relief over a short distance, together with its steep pyramidal form, makes it one of the most striking peaks in the Himalaya. Seen from the south it has the silhouette that earns it the nickname "Matterhorn of Nepal"; from other angles its double summit resembles the forked tail of a fish.

   Did you know? Wilfrid Noyce told the story of the 1957 attempt in his 1958 book Climbing the Fish's Tail, still the only published account of an authorised climb on the peak.

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10. 10 Naranjo de Bulnes (Picu Urriellu)

    Naranjo de Bulnes / Picu Urriellu

    Spain43.200° N 4.817° W

    

    Naranjo de Bulnes, known in Asturian as Picu Urriellu, is a single block of limestone standing alone in the Central Massif of the Picos de Europa. Seen from the meadows below, it looks less like a mountain than a monolith: smooth, almost sheer walls rising on every side to a summit at 2,519 metres. Its west face drops about 550 metres in an unbroken vertical wall, and in certain light the limestone takes on an orange hue — the most often suggested origin of the name "Naranjo", the orange tree.

    Did you know? A local saying protests the Castilian name: don't call me orange tree, for I bear no fruit, call me Picu Urriellu, my true name.

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11. 11 Adam's Peak

    Sri Lanka · 18 km from Ratnapura6.809° N 80.500° E

    

    Adam's Peak, or Sri Pada, rises to 2,243 metres from the forested hills of central Sri Lanka in a cone so regular that it is visible from far across the country. On the summit lies a hollow in the rock about 1.8 metres long that four faiths claim as their own: Buddhists revere it as the left footprint of the Buddha, Hindu tradition as the mark of Shiva or Hanuman, and Muslim and Christian traditions associate it with Adam — or, in some Christian accounts, with the apostle Thomas. Few mountains anywhere carry so many layers of devotion.

    Did you know? Its Tamil name, Sivanolipatha Malai, means roughly 'Mountain of Shiva's Light', while the Sinhala Samanalakanda honours the god Saman — or, some say, the butterflies that migrate there.

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12. 12 Secëda

    Seceda

    Italy · 30.2 km from Bolzano46.601° N 11.726° E

    

    Secëda is the mountain behind one of the most recognisable views in the Dolomites: a broad, grassy slope that rises gently from Val Gardena and then simply ends, breaking off along its crest into sheer, crumbling cliffs. Standing on the ridge you look along a line of tilted green meadows cut off as if with a knife, with the jagged rock towers of the Odle (Geisler) group rising beside them. The contrast — soft pasture on one side, a near-vertical drop of pale rock on the other — is what draws photographers here at every hour of the day.

    Did you know? Fragments of an ichthyosaur about 240 million years old have been found on Seceda, a rare find from a time when these marine reptiles had become scarce.

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13. 13 Buachaille Etive Mòr

    United Kingdom · 23 km from Fort William56.647° N 4.898° W

    

    Buachaille Etive Mòr stands at the point where the road across Rannoch Moor drops into Glen Coe, and its front peak, Stob Dearg, rises from the flat bog in a single steep pyramid of rock. Few mountains in Scotland are as instantly recognisable: seen from the A82, with the River Coupall or the Etive in the foreground, it looks like a sentinel guarding the entrance to the glen. The Gaelic name means "great herdsman of Etive", and it suits a peak that seems to watch over the moor.

    Did you know? The mountain is built largely of rhyolite and andesite from the Glencoe volcano, an ancient caldera that last erupted around 420 million years ago.

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14. 14 Yushan Main Peak

    Taiwan23.470° N 120.957° E

    

    Yushan, Jade Mountain, is the highest peak in Taiwan and the summit of a much wider region: at 3,952 metres it is the highest point in the western Pacific outside Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and one of the highest island summits on Earth, ranking fourth among the world's island high points. Its main peak rises in the interior of the island, and on clear mornings the summit can stand above a sea of cloud.

    Did you know? Under its Japanese name Niitakayama it was the highest mountain of the Japanese Empire for about half a century, 176 metres taller than Mount Fuji.

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15. 15 Cerro Torre

    Argentina49.291° S 73.099° W

    

    Cerro Torre is barely 3,128 metres high, yet it is one of the most coveted and argued-over summits on Earth. A needle of granite standing on the edge of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, on the border between Argentina and Chile just west of Fitz Roy, it shoots up from the glacier in walls that look impossibly smooth from below. The strangest thing about it is the crown: the relentless westerly winds off the ice cap plaster the top with rime, building a mushroom of frozen fog that overhangs the rock and can be as hard to climb as anything beneath it. Beside it stand its companions Torre Egger and Standhardt, forming a row of spires that looks almost too sharp to be real.

    Did you know? In 1980 the New Zealander Bill Denz spent five months trying to solo the Compressor Route; storms beat back all 13 attempts, the last just 60 metres short.

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16. 16 Vajolet Towers

    Torri del Vajolet

    Italy · 21 km from Bolzano46.462° N 11.627° E

    

    The Vajolet Towers are a cluster of slender rock spires standing shoulder to shoulder in the heart of the Rosengarten group (Catinaccio in Italian) in the Dolomites. Seen from below, they rise like the fingers of a raised hand, bare pale rock above the scree, so close together that from some angles they merge into a single jagged crown. The tallest, the Main Tower, reaches 2,821 metres; its neighbours, the East and North towers, the Stabeler, Winkler and Delago towers, are only a few metres lower, with the Piaz Tower standing apart at 2,670 metres.

    Did you know? Georg Winkler was just 17 years old when he soloed the tower that bears his name in 1887; a year later he was killed by an avalanche on the Weisshorn.

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17. 17 Alpamayo

    Peru8.879° S 77.653° W

    

    Alpamayo owes its fame to one side of it. Seen from the south-west, the 5,947-metre peak in Peru's Cordillera Blanca is a near-symmetrical wall of ice, its face scored top to bottom by parallel flutings that catch the light like pleats in fabric. In 1966 the German mountaineering magazine Alpinismus printed a photograph of that face by Leigh Ortenburger together with a poll of climbers, and the verdict that Alpamayo was the most beautiful mountain in the world has followed it ever since. It is a label that is easy to repeat and hard to argue with once you have seen the fluting in person.

    Did you know? Alpamayo takes its name from a nearby hamlet; in Quechua it combines words for earth and river, while locals call the peak Shuytu rahu, the slender snow mountain.

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18. 18 Mayon Volcano

    Philippines · 11.9 km from Legazpi13.257° N 123.685° E

    

    Mayon's cone is close to a geometric ideal, and volcanologists have actually put a number on how close: measuring the deviation of its slopes from a perfect cone, researchers have found an average departure of just over a metre against a typical average deviation of more than 21 metres for stratovolcanoes generally — making Mayon, by that measure, the most symmetrical large volcano on the planet. It's the kind of fact that sounds like tourist-brochure exaggeration until you see the underlying measurements.

    Did you know? Mayon's name comes from the Bicolano legend of Daragang Magayon, the 'beautiful lady', from whose burial ground with her lover Panganoron the volcano is said to have grown.

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19. 19 Pico do Areeiro

    Pico do Arieiro

    Portugal · 10.5 km from Funchal32.736° N 16.929° W

    

    Pico do Areeiro, at 1,818 metres the third-highest summit of Madeira, stands roughly halfway between the island's northern and southern coasts, in the heart of its volcanic interior. From the top the island falls away in every direction in a chaos of knife-edge ridges, dark basalt walls and plunging ravines — a landscape that looks raw and primeval for a place so close to the gardens and terraces of Funchal. On a clear day the view reaches as far as the island of Porto Santo, about 48 kilometres to the northeast.

    Did you know? Only two Madeiran peaks are higher: Pico Ruivo at 1,861 metres and Pico das Torres at 1,851 metres.

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20. 20 Ama Dablam

    Nepal27.861° N 86.861° E

    

    Few mountains are recognised from a single glance the way Ama Dablam is. Rising to 6,812 metres above the Khumbu valley in eastern Nepal, it is not among the giants of the region, yet trekkers heading towards Everest tend to photograph it more than any of them. Two long ridges sweep down from the summit like outstretched arms, and a hanging glacier sits high on the face between them. Sherpa speakers read that shape literally: the name means "mother's charm box", the arms of the ridges holding the dablam, the double-pendant amulet traditionally worn by women, which the glacier resembles. A lower western summit reaches 6,170 metres, and from certain angles the whole massif looks less like a peak than a carved throne.

    Did you know? The first summit party had spent the winter living at about 5,800 metres in a prefabricated hut built to study how the body adapts to altitude.

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21. 21 Laila Peak

    Pakistan35.592° N 76.410° E

    

    Laila Peak rises from the Gondogoro Glacier at the head of the Hushe Valley in the Karakoram, and its shape alone makes it famous: a slender spear of rock and ice, one of the most elegant mountains in a range full of giants. Its northwest face is a sweep of snow at about 45 degrees rising more than 1,500 vertical metres to the summit. The Scandinavian skiers who first tried to descend it in 2005 said it pointed straight up into the sky like a needle. Its height has long been disputed, with figures ranging from about 6,100 to over 6,600 metres; a Japanese map published in 2003 gives 6,096 metres.

    Did you know? The first known ascent came in 1987, when four British climbers including Simon Yates reached the summit via the northwest face without an official permit.

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22. 22 Suilven

    United Kingdom58.115° N 5.137° W

    

    Seen from the coast at Lochinver, Suilven looks less like a mountain than a single tower of rock standing alone on a plain of bog and lochans. In reality it is a narrow ridge about two kilometres long, and from the side it shows three tops strung along a sheer-sided crest; from either end it appears as a sugarloaf. Its Norse name, from súla fjall, means "pillar mountain" – with the Gaelic beinn later substituted for the Norse word.

    Did you know? Suilven's sandstone is around a billion years old, yet the Lewisian gneiss it rests on dates back as much as three billion years.

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23. 23 Mitre Peak

    New Zealand44.633° S 167.856° E

    

    Mitre Peak is the mountain in the picture most people carry of New Zealand's fiords. It rises straight out of the water of Milford Sound, in Fiordland National Park on the south-west coast of the South Island, climbing close to 1,700 metres from sea level in a single sweep of rock. What reads from the water as one sharp point is in fact a tight cluster of five summits, stacked so that from most angles they merge into a single spire. Captain John Lort Stokes of the survey ship HMS Acheron gave it its English name for its resemblance to a bishop's mitre; its Māori name is Rahotu.

    Did you know? The first known attempt on the peak was made in 1883 by artist Samuel Mereton and Donald Sutherland, carrying no coats and one biscuit each.

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24. 24 Dedo de Deus

    Brazil · 15.5 km from Petrópolis22.500° S 43.050° W

    

    From the road that climbs out of the Guanabara lowlands towards Teresópolis, one summit in the Serra dos Órgãos refuses to look like a mountain at all. Dedo de Deus, "God's Finger", rises to 1,692 metres as a single blade of rock beside a cluster of lower knuckles, so that the whole ridge reads as a hand with its index finger raised to the sky. On a clear day the silhouette carries roughly 50 kilometres to Rio de Janeiro, and it has become the emblem of the state: the profile of the range with the Finger standing out is on Rio de Janeiro's flag and coat of arms, and on the civic symbols of Teresópolis, Magé and Guapimirim as well.

    Did you know? Foreign climbers had reportedly judged the Finger impossible before five local men with no mountaineering experience reached the top in 1912.

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25. 25 Dent du Géant

    Dente del Gigante

    Italy · 31.5 km from Aosta45.862° N 6.952° E

    

    Among the snow domes and broad ridges of the Mont Blanc massif, the Dent du Géant — the Giant's Tooth — is the shape nobody mistakes. It is a sheer monolith of pale granite rising from the Rochefort ridge on the frontier between France and Italy, a blunt fang standing straight up out of the glacier world. It has two tops a few metres apart: Pointe Sella at 4,009 m and the slightly higher Pointe Graham at 4,013 m, which makes it one of the Alpine four-thousanders.

    Did you know? The two summits stand only about 27 metres apart, separated by a small notch in the rock.

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26. 26 Tupopdan (Passu Cones)

    Tupopdan

    Pakistan36.556° N 74.934° E

    

    Tupopdan, better known to travellers as the Passu Cones or Passu Cathedral, is a row of sharp limestone spires that rises above the Hunza valley in northern Pakistan like a set of organ pipes or a Gothic façade. For anyone driving the Karakoram Highway it is the defining sight of Upper Hunza: the jagged skyline, often dusted with snow, seems almost too regular to be natural. It is said to be the most photographed peak of the region, and it is easy to see why.

    Did you know? Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void, was part of the 1987 first-ascent expedition, the year he returned to climbing after his Siula Grande accident.

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