- In 2023, La Corona, Venezuela’s last standing glacier in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida National Park, was reclassified as an ice field, having shrunk to the size of barely two football fields.
- The country is now the first tropical nation to lose all of its glaciers, which melted rapidly due to a combination of warming temperatures, reduced rainfall and ineffective policies since early signs of melting appeared in the late 19th century.
- As Venezuela’s symbolic glaciers began melting one after another, a team of researchers started studying not only their disappearance, but the emerging ecosystems that were taking over the formerly icy areas.
- With the ice gone, the city of Mérida, advertised for decades as the “city of eternal snow,” is now having to reinvent its identity and its tourism industry.
MÉRIDA, Venezuela- José Betancourt, 75, climbed to the glacier of Pico Bolívar, Venezuela’s highest peak, 158 times before it disappeared in 2017. He’s also summited the nearby Pico Humboldt, the country’s second-highest peak, more than 100 times. At 4,925 meters (16,158 feet), Humboldt still has a glacier — for now. In 2023, scientists demoted the ever-shrinking glacier, La Corona, covering an area barely larger than two football fields, to ice field status.
Venezuela has become the first tropical country to lose all its glaciers. But with most of the ice gone, the mountains are seeing new life emerge, and local communities are seeking to reinvent the identity of the city of Mérida, a place once known for its eternal snows.
In the early 1900s, Sierra Nevada de Mérida National Park in western Venezuela was home to more than 10 prominent glaciers formed during the last glacial period, about 21,500 years ago. These sat atop the peaks of El Toro, El León, Espejo, Bolívar, La Concha, Bonpland and Humboldt.
Their retreat first became visible at the end of the 19th century. In 1890, Venezuelan writer and historian Tulio Febres Cordero wrote: “It has been said for some time that the snow in the mountains is diminishing; and the older neighbors point out with sadness the places where the snow has completely disappeared. The decrease is slow, but unfortunately true.”
The first glacier in Venezuela to disappear in the 20th century was the one on Pico El Toro, according to Alejandra Melfo, a physicist at the University of the Andes who studies glacial retreat in Mérida.
However, the total disappearance of the glaciers was something even residents of Mérida didn’t anticipate. “I would not admit that the glaciers of our Sierra Nevada were going to melt,” Betancourt, a mountaineer and guide for more than 50 years, tells Mongabay. “We all knew Mérida as the city of ‘the eternal snows.’ But now, all that is just a memory.”
The melting of glaciers in Venezuela accelerated from the mid-1970s onward, reaching an average annual loss of more than 5% in recent decades. By early 2020, the glacier on Pico Bolívar had already disappeared, while La Corona had shrunk by 99% in little more than a century. By March 2024, its ice surface measured only 2 hectares (5 acres), according to NASA.
Melfo worked with Luis Daniel Llambí Cartaya, an ecologist who led the research project to document the retreat of La Corona, Venezuela’s last glacier, and the emergence of the new ecosystems replacing the ice. Their research at the University of the Andes explains how global warming and phenomena such as El Niño have accelerated the melting of this last glacier.
Between 1961 and 2011, precipitation decreased and temperatures increased in Mérida. According to Llambí Cartaya and Melfo, temperatures in the tropical Andes have increased on average by 0.1° Celsius (0.2° Fahrenheit) per decade in the last 70 years, and by more than 0.3°C (0.5°F) after 1980.
While the glacial retreat taking place around the world is part of the long-term interglacial period currently underway, the acceleration of this natural process is a consequence of human-induced climate change, Melfo tells Mongabay.
“We have evidence that climate change has significantly accelerated this process. Particularly since the 1970s, we have observed an increase in the rate of glacier disappearance in Venezuela,” she says. “We do not know, if the climate had not been influenced by human activity, whether these glaciers could have survived this interglacial period and not vanished completely. This may have been the case.”
When the first reports about the melting came out, the Venezuelan government took some palliative measures in 2018 to protect La Corona. It initially restricted access to the area and modified tourist trekking routes. It later introduced a new mountain guide certification program and an environmental education plan.
In March 2024, the Venezuelan government announced the installation of a 0.77-hectare (1.9-acre) geothermal blanket over what remained of La Corona. This move was criticized by ecologists, scientists, mountaineers and former park rangers for lacking an environmental impact assessment and for failing to consult with experts in glaciology. A further investigation raised questions over the government’s purchase of the cover, done in a rushed manner and without following public acquisition rules.
By December 2024, the government presented the project’s progress, saying the melting had been reduced by 35%, which would prolong the glacier’s life by 18 months. But at the same announcement, Josué Lorca, the minister in charge of the environment, said: “It is projected that we will lose its total mass by December 2025.”
“Covering the glaciers is not a solution,” Melfo says. “It is very expensive, it is very difficult and it does not solve things. What we have to do is stop doing what we are doing wrong. The least we can do in the face of disappearing glaciers is to take a lesson: human beings are not all-powerful and cannot control nature.”
New life replaces the ice
Llambí Cartaya and Melfo, together with other Venezuelan scientists, have since 2019 been looking at the emergence of new ecosystems in areas previously covered by glacial ice. Apart from mapping La Corona’s melting, they’re also interested in how plants such as lichens and grasses have started to replace the ice.
Llambí Cartaya says this research idea came to life in 2015 as part of the Vida Glacial project, in which microbiologists from Mérida documented the presence of microorganisms in the ice of the Pico Bolívar glacier, the second-to-last to disappear. Afterward, Melfo approached Llambí Cartaya to initiate a study on glacier retreat, a process that had been insufficiently documented. At the time, there was also no research on the life that might emerge following the glaciers’ disappearance in Venezuela.
Their work drew on a wide range of information sources dating back to 1910, when botanist and geographer Alfredo Jahn created the first map of the area. Since the satellite imagery available to them wasn’t sufficiently detailed to monitor such a small glacier, the team compiled historical and present-day maps, panoramic photographs, aerial and satellite images, as well as interviews with mountaineers and direct field observations.
The main goal was to establish a timeline to understand the factors contributing to the transformation of a glacial ecosystem into a new ecosystem — one rich in plant and animal life.
Their findings revealed a fascinating ecological progression. Between 1910 and 2009, the first century of succession — the process by which a biological community changes in an ecosystem — there was a gradual increase in soil organic matter. Pioneering organisms such as lichens and mosses populated the area, even on the thin soil layer; slowly, this colonization generated nutrient-rich surface layers known as biocrusts, which helped lower surface temperatures and allowed vascular plants to appear. The researchers found 47 different species of lichens — 25 of them newly recorded in Venezuela, and seven of them possibly new species unknown to science.
This development occurred despite harsh environmental conditions such as steep slopes, exposed rocks and limited vegetation. Lichens and mosses created microhabitats that facilitated the colonization by Poa petrosa, a grass species typically found at elevations above 3,800 m (12,500 ft) and one of the first vascular plants to appear in the new ecosystem.
The ecological transition wasn’t linear. After 42 years of lichen dominance and expansion of mosses and vascular plants, in 1952 their diversity and abundance began to decline, giving way to a phase dominated by mosses and other non-vascular plants, Llambí Cartaya says. By 2009, vascular plants became the main structural component of the vegetation, marking a full century of ecological succession.
This shift was made possible by a surprisingly small biological network: just six plant species and six pollinator species, including hummingbirds, bees and flies.
The study highlighted the critical role of lichens and bryophytes (which include mosses) as pioneer species in tropical alpine environments. But it also showed that the slow colonization of vascular plants may be linked to limitations in seed dispersal and pollination, suggesting that these ecosystems may respond slowly to rapid glacier loss and climate change.
Llambí Cartaya and Melfo were also part of a team that in 2024 conducted the first ecosystem red list assessment of a tropical glacier ecosystem, using the methodology drawn up by the IUCN, the global conservation authority. Their findings indicated that the glacier substrate in the Cordillera de Mérida tropical glacier ecosystem had declined by 90% in the last 20 years and that it would disappear in the following five years due to rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns. The study classified the cordillera as critically endangered.
The research also warned that the loss of the ice would also lead to the destruction of soil and subsoil habitats for cold-adapted microorganisms and other specialized species. Although previous scientific expeditions to La Corona had preserved some samples of ice that no longer exists, power outages at the University of the Andes had resulted in the loss of many samples as refrigeration systems failed.
By providing the first formal assessment of a tropical glacier under the IUCN Red List framework, the research set a precedent for future comparative studies on the effects of global warming on high mountain environments and their unique biodiversity.
As ice vanishes, mountaineering adapts
Susana Rodríguez is a mountaineer and tour operator in Mérida. She recalls that the first time she saw La Corona, in July 2007, she was able to walk over the ice for more than an hour. The last time she went, in December 2023, there was virtually no ice left.
“The first few times I went to Humboldt, we had to carry special equipment for ice climbing, like crampons and ice axes. Now, we practically don’t need them; you can get to the summit without touching the ice,” Rodríguez tells Mongabay. “Mountaineering in Mérida now is mostly trekking and some very simple climbing. Even the climbing techniques we have had to change, because it is not the same to climb on ice as on rock.”
Rosa Pabón, the first Venezuelan woman to climb Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, says she climbed several glaciers in Sierra Nevada de Mérida National Park between the 1970s and 1990s.
“When I was studying at university, I was so passionate about mountaineering that I constantly climbed with my classmates to the glaciers of Timoncitos, La Concha and Pico Bolívar to train for higher mountains outside the country,” Pabón says.
Going to Sierra Nevada de Mérida was also the only form of ice climbing in Venezuela for mountaineers from across the country. “I started my mountaineering career in 1989,” says biologist Federico Pisani, who lives in the capital, Caracas. “On that occasion, we climbed Pico Humboldt, crossing a glacier that, at the time, seemed endless to me.
“On the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada de Mérida I learned everything a mountaineer should know: how to cross a glacier’s crevasses, the use of ice axes, ice screws and crampons on the different slopes and how to brake in case of a fall,” Pisani says. “It seems incredible to me that today the glaciers where I learned all these skills and techniques no longer exist.”
But he adds the disappearance of Venezuela’s glaciers has made the climbing and mountaineering community adapt their sport to the new landscape. “Rock climbing has been in the spotlight. New climbing areas and new big wall routes have opened up. Rock climbers have grown in numbers and have ‘colonized’ the spaces previously reserved for ice sports”, he says.
Mérida has to adapt
Abilio and Carmen Peña have a farm in El Hato, one of the seven villages that make up the parish of Los Nevados de Mérida. It sits at an elevation of more than 2,200 m (7,200 ft), and in the last few years they’ve been able to diversify the crops and trees they grow.
“About 50 years ago, when I was about 10 years old, my brother brought a banana tree from Santa Cruz de Mora [a city in Mérida state],” Abilio tells Mongabay. “We planted it and it lasted about five years in one place without growing, to the point that he took it back there because the plant was suffering. Now we have several that have been bearing good fruit for about 10 years.”
According to Carmen, in the last few years they’ve also been able to grow pears, figs, lemons, cape gooseberries and even sugarcane. “Now we cut the cane every three months. We think it must be the climate, because it’s not so cold here anymore,” she says.
Juan de Dios Dugarte, 84, is an artisan and lifelong resident of Los Nevados. He tells of a childhood when snow would blanket the entire landscape and he would play hide-and-seek beneath it while traveling through the Sierra Nevada alongside his father, a muleteer. Now, he jokes that the only snow left is the gray in his hair.
“On a farm I own very high on the mountain — at about 2,800 meters — there were no corn or black bean crops when I was a child, and now I have both. The temperature is warmer now, and that is also why the snow is exhausted here,” he tells Mongabay.
It’s not certain that these changes are a direct consequence of global warming, says Llambí Cartaya, the ecologist. “Climate change models in crops predict shifts to higher areas, but it is difficult to prove. It’s just a hypothesis,” he says.
Postcards, pictures and tourist posters of Mérida have always featured snow. Betancourt is one of two climbers who appear on a famous poster in a series made by the Venezuelan government in the 1970s to promote tourism. He’s the one seen climbing the glacier of Pico Bolívar with boots and an ice ax that he still owns.
But the icy part of the poster no longer exists, and that has hit Mérida’s tourism.
Omar La Cruz is one of about 100 muleteers in Los Nevados, Venezuela’s only glacier-side town. On a Mongabay visit to the town, he says tourism has decreased a lot there, and not only because of Venezuela’s current economic crisis.
“People used to come here to see the snow. Many mountaineers used to spend the night here to acclimatize and then climb the glaciers, but now there is no more snow and that’s why they don’t come here as much,” La Cruz says.
Banner image: A scientist from Venezuela’s Last Glacier project collects ice samples from La Corona in December 2023. Image by Stefano Pozzebon.
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