Rainbow Mountain
Vinicunca
A ridge high in the Andes striped in red, yellow, green and lavender by layers of different minerals.
Why Vinicunca is striped red
Vinicunca is a mountain ridge south-east of Cusco in Peru, more than 5,000 metres above sea level. Its slopes are striped in bands of colour. They are layers of sediment, each with different minerals: iron oxides give red, iron sulphides and other compounds give yellow, and clays rich in certain minerals give green. The layers were later tilted on end as the Andes rose. The mountain became widely known only in the mid 2010s. It is often said that snow covered it until then, though this is disputed. Thousands of people now walk or ride horses up each day, which has brought income to local herding communities and wear to the trail. The thin air makes the climb hard.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Vinicunca
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Vinicunca" on Wikipedia. If you know Vinicunca and we have it wrong, tell us.
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🇮🇳 Akbar's red sandstone cityFatehpur SikriA Mughal capital built in one red stone in the 1570s and left by the court only a few years later.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kanchipuram In: Ssriram mt, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Auroville In: Kaspar Konrad, Public domain, source
- Fatehpur Sikri In: HibaSiddiqui, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Cusco Pe: gertrudis2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, source