Pico da Neblina (, literally "Mist Peak") is the highest mountain in Brazil, at above sea level. It rises in northwestern Amazonas, in the Serra da Neblina of the Serra do Imeri, near the southern edge of the Guiana Highlands. The summit lies about inside Brazil. Nearby Pico 31 de Março, the country's second-highest summit at , lies directly on the Brazil–Venezuela border. Pico da Neblina is the highest point of the Guiana Shield and the highest point in South America east of the Andean cordilleras.
Yanomami communities of the Cauaburis region call the mountain Yaripo, usually translated as "Mountain of the Winds". The name also covers the high ridge carrying Pico da Neblina and Pico 31 de Março. Yaripo is sacred in Yanomami belief. Sites along the route to the summit figure in ancestral stories and in rituals concerning spirits and the natural world. The summit is inside Pico da Neblina National Park and the Yanomami Indigenous Territory. The Brazilian national park was created in 1979.
The mountain rises steeply above the lowlands of the upper Rio Negro basin. Resistant quartz-rich rocks form much of the upper mountain, where narrow ridges and escarpments rise above high ground exceeding . Temperature falls sharply with elevation, and rain, cloud and mist keep the upper slopes wet for long periods. Amazonian rainforest at lower elevations changes into montane forest and, higher up, low shrubs, herbs, exposed rock and saturated ground. Some species of the upper massif occur nowhere else, or in only a few other parts of the Guiana Highlands. Among them are the frogs Neblinaphryne mayeri and Caligophryne doylei. Their nearest living relatives diverged from them more than 45 million years ago.
Naturalists had seen the mountains from the Rio Negro by the nineteenth century, but expeditions began entering the upper massif in the 1950s. Brazilian topographer José Ambrósio de Miranda Pombo made the first known ascent of Pico da Neblina in 1965 while working on the Brazil–Venezuela boundary. Tourist climbing grew during the late twentieth century, then stopped in 2003 after disputes over entry into Yanomami territory and damage inside the national park. Visits resumed in 2022 under the Yanomami-run Yaripo ecotourism program. Illegal gold mining, hunting and unauthorized entry still affect the protected lands around the mountain, while species confined to the highest elevations face risks from warming and amphibian disease.
Names
Yanomami communities of the Cauaburis region call the mountain Yaripo, usually translated as "Mountain of the Winds". Serra Yaripo also names the high ridge carrying Pico da Neblina and neighbouring Pico 31 de Março, which has its own Yanomami name, Kurarana. In Yanomami speech, Pico da Neblina is a napëpë name, brought by white people and other outsiders.
While travelling near Marabitanas on the Rio Negro in 1853, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote that he could see the "serras of the Cababurís". Richard Spruce also saw a distant ridge with steep escarpments from the same area. John F. Pruski interpreted Wallace's mountains as probably corresponding to what is now called the Serra da Neblina, although Wallace drew them too far west. The older names do not fit present maps neatly. Pirabuku and Imei were also used for mountains near the frontier, without a firm match to names adopted afterward.
On the Brazilian side, mountains north of the Rio Negro were also called Serra do Caburi. Brazilian botanist Ricardo de Lemos Fróis, who had seen them from the air in 1952, thought the Cerro de la Neblina publicized in the 1950s was one of its peaks. He wrote that people along the Rio Negro already knew the Serra do Caburi and told Indigenous stories about it. Serra do Caburi did not become the usual name for the massif.
The Phelps expedition travelled to the mountains in 1954 using the Venezuelan name Cerro Jimé. Kathleen Deery de Phelps retained it in the title of her memoir, Memorias de Misia Kathy: Primera Expedición Phelps al "Cerro Jimé", actual Cerro de La Neblina.
Bassett Maguire and Charles D. Reynolds used Cerro de la Neblina in print by 1955. Neblina means mist or fog. In Venezuela, Cerro de la Neblina and Serranía La Neblina are used for the massif. In Brazil, Pico da Neblina, literally "Mist Peak", names the highest summit, while Serra da Neblina names the surrounding mountains. Pico da Neblina was already the federal name when the national park was created in 1979.
A plant collected on the Brazilian side in December 1965 gave its locality as Pico Phelps at . Scientific work from the 1980s sometimes paired Pico Phelps with Pico da Neblina, and specimens from a 1984–1985 expedition were labelled "Pico Phelps (= Pico Neblina)". The Venezuelan park service uses Pico Phelps for the highest summit on its side of the massif. Brazilian maps call the neighbouring summit on the international boundary Pico 31 de Março, with an official elevation of . These uses do not consistently point to a single summit.
Geography
Location and protected status
Pico da Neblina rises in the Serra do Imeri of northwestern Amazonas, near the Venezuelan frontier, with its summit in the municipality of Santa Isabel do Rio Negro. Pico da Neblina National Park extends eastward into São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Of the park's area, 70.79 percent lies in Santa Isabel do Rio Negro and 29.21 percent in São Gabriel da Cachoeira.
The summit lies within the national park and the Yanomami Indigenous Territory. The park also overlaps the Balaio, Médio Rio Negro II and Cué-Cué Marabitanas Indigenous Territories. Indigenous territories cover nearly 72 percent of the park, with the Yanomami territory alone covering just over half.
Pico da Neblina National Park was created on 5 June 1979 along the Venezuelan frontier. Across the border, the massif enters Venezuela's Serranía de la Neblina National Park, established in 1978. Brazil added Pico da Neblina National Park to its UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 1996 under natural criteria vii, ix and x.
International border and nearby summits
Although the Neblina massif crosses the Brazil–Venezuela frontier, Pico da Neblina itself lies about inside Brazil.
Less than one kilometre away, Pico 31 de Março rises directly on the international boundary. At , it is Brazil's second-highest summit and stands below Pico da Neblina. Both summits rise from the highest part of the Serra do Imeri.
Pico da Neblina is the highest point of the Guiana Shield and the highest point in South America east of the Andean cordilleras. Calling it the highest mountain in South America "outside the Andes" is less exact because Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, physically separate from the main Andean cordilleras, rises above .
Elevation measurements
For decades, Pico da Neblina was given an elevation of , based on a barometric measurement made in the 1960s by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' First Boundary Demarcation Commission.
In 2004, a team from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the Instituto Militar de Engenharia returned to the summit with geodetic GPS equipment as part of the Projeto Pontos Culminantes, which remeasured Brazil's highest mountains. Their measurement gave Pico da Neblina an elevation of , about below the value then in use.
A new conversion of the 2004 GPS observations in 2016 raised the calculated elevation to without another climb. GPS measures height against a mathematical model of the Earth's shape, while an elevation tied to sea level also depends on a model of the Earth's gravity field. Applying MAPGEO2015 added to the earlier result. Pico 31 de Março received the same correction, from to . The mountains themselves had not risen.
IBGE replaced MAPGEO2015 with hgeoHNOR2020 in 2021, a model that converts GNSS measurements into the normal heights used by the Brazilian Geodetic System. The official elevation of Pico da Neblina remains .
Geology and topography
Geology
Pico da Neblina rises from the western Guiana Shield, part of the ancient Amazonian Craton. The Neblina massif lies near the southern edge of the Pantepui highlands, separated from other high mountain blocks of the Guiana Shield by much lower ground. It extends for about from north to south and from east to west, with most of the massif in Venezuela.
The upper mountain rests on ancient crystalline rock and is built largely from the Neblina Formation, with quartz-rich sandstone, quartzite and conglomeratic rock, some of it altered by metamorphism. The quartz-rich beds wear away more slowly than the surrounding rock, leaving cliffs and narrow ridges.
The Neblina rocks were once grouped with the Roraima Supergroup, whose sandstones form many of the table mountains farther north, but they belong to a younger sedimentary basin. The Roraima sequence contains volcanic material dated to about 1.87 billion years ago and had been cut by mafic intrusions by about 1.78 billion years ago. The Neblina sediments accumulated afterward from material eroded from older belts to the east and northeast.
Deformation of parts of the western basin around 1.33 billion years ago tilted the rock layers near Pico da Neblina steeply. Erosion then left the harder beds standing along the summit ridge. Pico da Neblina is a hogback, a narrow ridge formed along these steeply inclined layers.
Relief
Pico da Neblina rises from the Amazon-Orinoco divide, a mountain belt running roughly southwest to northeast across the northern edge of Amazonas. High plateaus are cut by steep slopes, escarpments and closely spaced stream valleys. Much of the ground immediately south of the mountains lies only above sea level.
Near the mouth of the Tucano River, the southeastern side of the massif lies only about above sea level. From there the ground rises to at the top of Cachoeira do Anta before reaching the highest ridges. Pico da Neblina rises more than above some nearby lowlands.
Broad stretches of high ground between about are broken by valleys and rock walls. Unlike the broad, flat-topped tepuis found elsewhere in the Guiana Highlands, Neblina has been deeply cut by erosion, with Pico da Neblina rising from the southern edge of the plateau as a narrow crest.
Pico 31 de Março rises beside it from the same high ground. A saddle separates the summits, and the international boundary crosses Pico 31 de Março before continuing through the massif. From some directions the two peaks merge into the same ridge, although Pico da Neblina rises higher.
Farther north, on the Venezuelan side, the plateau spreads more widely before breaking into cliffs and deeply cut valleys. Cañon Grande reaches into the massif and carries the headwaters of the Río Mawarinuma.
Drainage and erosion
The crest of the Serra do Imeri forms part of the divide between the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Water flowing south enters tributaries of the Rio Negro and then the Amazon River, while streams on the northern side descend toward the Orinoco.
The Cauaburis drains much of the Brazilian side below Pico da Neblina, and the national park also contains the headwaters of the Yá-Mirim, Yá, Maiá, Marauiá and Ariabu rivers. Their tributaries cut a dense network of channels through the mountain belt.
Rain and running water have carved escarpments, waterfalls and steep-sided valleys into the upper rock. Harder quartz-rich beds remain as cliffs and ridges while weaker material wears away around them. Cachoeira do Anta falls from the high ground on the Brazilian side, while Cañon Grande cuts deeply into the Venezuelan plateau.
Climate
Below about , mean annual temperatures remain above . Between , they fall to about , then to higher on the slopes and about in the highest belt.