Huascarán National Park
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, want-to-go and the year you stood here are recorded in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Huascarán National Park protects the Cordillera Blanca in Peru's central Andes, part of the highest tropical mountain range in the world. It covers 340,000 hectares with 27 snow peaks above 6,000 metres, and Huascarán itself, at 6,768 metres, is the highest point in Peru.
Efforts to protect the range began in 1960, when Senator Augusto Guzmán Robles put a bill for a national park before Congress. A surveillance zone for the vicuña and the queen of the Andes plant followed in the 1960s, and a supreme decree created the park on 1 July 1975. It became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1977 and a World Heritage Site in 1985.
On 31 May 1970 the Ancash earthquake brought down a large part of Huascarán's north face. The avalanche of ice, mud and rock ran about 18 km and buried the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca, killing more than 20,000 people. Perhaps a quarter of the range's glacier ice has gone since the late 1960s, a concern for the water supply downstream.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).