Villarrica

Villarrica rises 9,341 feet above the lake district of southern Chile, one of the most active volcanoes in South America. The Mapuche call it Rucapillan, the house of the spirit, and its summit crater often glows at night above the resort town of Pucon. Despite the activity, the mountain is climbed constantly: a single day on crampons brings guided parties to a crater rim where the volcano’s inner workings are sometimes visible below.

This map shows an almost textbook volcanic cone. The contour lines run in smooth, concentric rings from the crater outward, their symmetry broken only by the gullies that meltwater and past eruptions have cut into the glaciated upper slopes. The lines widen steadily toward the base, where the cone settles into the forested lowlands, and the shoreline of Lake Villarrica marks the northern edge of the terrain. Few mountains reduce so cleanly to pure geometry on paper.