The total trek is physically demanding but accessible to reasonably fit hikers with proper preparation.

The 1884 ascent was not the first time any human had stood on Roraima’s summit — that claim would require ignoring the Pemon and their predecessors, for whom the mountain was a known and significant landscape.

But it was the first systematic botanical and geographical documentation of the summit in the European scientific tradition, and it opened the mountain to the broader world of natural history.

What The Botanists Found — And What They Named