Nevado del Sumapaz facts for kids

Nevado del Sumapaz is a very tall mountain in Colombia. It is the highest point in a part of Colombia called the Meta Department. This mountain is located inside a special protected area known as Sumapaz National Park. You can reach the top of Nevado del Sumapaz by road from a town called San Juan del Sumapaz. The mountain is about 4,306 meters (or 14,127 feet) high above the sea. Long ago, this mountain had a cap of snow and ice, but it completely melted away in the early 1900s. This happened because of changes in the weather and the land.

Exploring Nevado del Sumapaz

People have been exploring the area around Nevado del Sumapaz for a long time.

Early Explorers (1500s)

In the 1500s, several European explorers traveled through the region of Nevado del Sumapaz. Some of these explorers included Nikolaus Federmann in 1539, López Montalvo de Lugo in 1540, and Hernán Pérez de Quesada also in 1540. Later, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada explored the area in 1570.

There was also a trade route that connected the city of Santa Fe (which is now Bogotá) with San Martín. However, this route was eventually stopped because the land was very wild and difficult to travel through.

Modern Explorers (1900s)

A person named Erwin Kraus made his first trip to Nevado del Sumapaz in 1939. He had heard stories that there was still a glacier, which is a large sheet of ice, at the very top of the mountain.

But when he arrived, he found that the glacier was gone. Only the oldest people living in the area remembered it. They said the glacier had disappeared during an earthquake on August 31, 1917. The earthquake happened in a nearby village called Nazareth in Sumapaz.

See also

In Spanish: Nevado del Sumapaz para niños