Mérida and the Sierra Nevada

The retreat is one of the best documented glacier losses anywhere, largely because a team at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida spent years reconstructing it. Their 2020 paper, titled The End of the Eternal Snows, mapped the ice across 1952, 1998, 2009, 2015, 2016 and 2019 and found that glacial area had fallen from 2.317 square kilometres to 0.046, a loss of ninety-eight percent, with the retreat accelerating to nearly seventeen percent a year in the final stretch. The last survivor was La Corona on Pico Humboldt, sheltered in a saddle shaded from the morning sun. NASA imagery from March 2024 showed it had shrunk from four hundred and fifty hectares to two. In early May 2024 the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative stated it was too small to be classified as a glacier at all. Glaciologists generally use a threshold of around ten hectares, and require that the ice deform under its own weight. La Corona met neither test. Climbers now summit Pico Humboldt without touching ice, on a route that used to require crampons and an axe.

In December 2023, with under two hectares of ice left, the Venezuelan government tried to save it. Thirty-five rolls of industrial geotextile, eighty kilos each, were shipped from Italy and flown up to the Humboldt camp by military helicopter to be laid over the remaining glacier as a thermal blanket. The response from the scientific community was blunt. A professor at the university in Mérida called it an illusory thing, a hallucination, completely absurd. A quaternary geologist pointed out that geotextiles work seasonally on European ski slopes above forty degrees north, where there is a winter and a summer, and that the tropics do not offer that. A zoologist worried the sheeting would suffocate the rare mosses, lichens and hummingbirds living on the rock beneath. Others raised microplastic contamination of the soils and the lagoons downstream. There was no environmental impact study and no public consultation. Some defended it as a gesture worth making. Most of the people who study these mountains did not.

The more interesting story is what happened next. The rock exposed by the retreating ice is being colonised in a sequence that researchers at the Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Ecológicas have been documenting as it unfolds, which is a rare thing to be able to watch in real time. Lichens and mosses arrive first and form biological soil crusts. Surveys have identified forty-seven lichen species, twenty-five of them new records for Venezuela and seven possibly new to science, alongside fifty-five species of moss. The first vascular plant to establish is a grass, Poa petrosa. After that, something resembling páramo. Long-term monitoring runs through GLORIA-Andes, with permanent plots and buried temperature sensors on summits between 3,800 and 4,600 metres. The underlying phenomenon is the páramo migrating upward as warming pushes alpine plants higher, and as one of the researchers puts it, there is a race on between the speed of that warming and the ability of the vegetation to follow it.

Between the treeline at around three thousand metres and the old snowline sits the páramo, the high tropical alpine ecosystem that the northern Andes do better than anywhere. Its emblem is the frailejón, a rosette plant of the genus Espeletia with thick silver-haired leaves that it keeps after they die, wrapped around the stem as insulation. Frailejones grow a few centimetres a year and live for a century or more, and they matter far beyond their appearance: they strip moisture from fog and transpire very little, which is most of why the páramo functions as a water tower for everything below it. Venezuela has around sixty-eight Espeletia species and Mérida is the centre of their diversity with roughly forty-four of them, with local endemism in the group running near ninety percent. The wildlife is harder to see and worth knowing about: spectacled bears, páramo rabbits, Mérida brocket deer, and the white-bearded helmetcrest, a hummingbird that lives between 3,600 and 4,500 metres and feeds on frailejón flowers. Andean condors were reintroduced here from 1993 and the population largely failed; a new breeding programme began in 2024.

The Andean legend of the cinco águilas blancas ties the five snow-crowned peaks above Mérida to five mythical white eagles, whose feathers became the snows. The peaks are still there. Pico Bolívar at 4,978 metres is the highest point in Venezuela and a genuine technical climb, requiring rope and harness year round. Pico Humboldt at 4,942 metres is the one most people walk, a three to four day trek from La Mucuy through cloud forest to Laguna Coromoto and then up past Laguna Verde to the summit. Sierra Nevada National Park, declared on 2 May 1952 and now covering 276,446 hectares, protects both, and spans an elevational gradient from six hundred metres on the Barinas side to nearly five thousand, one of the most complete in the Neotropics. To the north, Sierra de La Culata National Park was declared in 1989 across a further 200,400 hectares of drier, higher plateau páramo, and supplies most of the irrigation water for three states.