The Andes have figured prominently in the global history of knowledge, aesthetics, politics and mountaineering. Since the late 18th century, the massive Chimborazo volcano has served as a convenient metonym for the entire mountain range, and for good reason. Until the 1840s, Chimborazo was thought to be the highest peak on the planet. Although it was later demonstrated not to be so, due to the equatorial bulge Chimborazo’s imposing summit is still the closest you can get to the sun on Earth.

As a paramount symbol of tropical wonder and the will to knowledge, Chimborazo beckoned savants, revolutionaries and artists, including Charles Marie de La Condamine in 1746; Carlos Montúfar, Aimé Bonpland and Alexander von Humboldt in 1802; Simón Bolívar in 1822; Frederic Edwin Church in 1853; and Edward Whymper in 1880. Although Whymper is credited with being the first to reach the true summit, like his predecessors who failed to reach the top he was led up the slopes either by local pastoralists, seasoned ice-collectors or guides. Archaeologists have identified on the expansive north-western slope remains associated with the early modern Chimbo and Guaranda chiefdoms, whose descendants inhabit the region today, and small propitiation sites indicate ancient human presence and belief at higher altitudes.

Since the early 19th century, the biogeographical concept of tropical verticality has been associated with the Andes and Chimborazo in particular, thanks in part to the worldwide circulation and fame of striking images of the volcano produced by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland (Figure 1). But contrary to common belief the concept was not invented or discovered by Humboldt.

Simón Bolívar, who claimed in his poem ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’ to have surpassed Humboldt’s footsteps on the slopes of Chimborazo, called his sometime friend and ally ‘the discoverer of the New World’.¹ But it should be noted that the Venezuelan revolutionary did so for ideological or political reasons. The championing of Humboldt served a concerted republican effort to negate the formidable knowledge produced under enlightened Spanish rule. What Humboldt discovered in the New World was for the most part already existing knowledge, which the Prussian repackaged and sold to European and North American readers eager to learn about a land about which they knew very little.

The notion that ecological diversity or plenitude depended upon altitude rather than latitude was first articulated in print not by Humboldt but by Hispanic natural historians who lived in the Andes in the 16th century. These natural historians combined classical Aristotelian concepts with observations and existing Andean knowledge and practices of verticality that had long operated on a grand scale under the umbrella of the Inca state. Fully two centuries before Humboldt’s expedition, South America was seen to be a providential space of natural wonder, a microcosmos endowed with all the climates of the world, and thus capable of giving birth to and nurturing any divine, natural or human being. This microcosmic tradition was the result of the early colonial meeting of Andean and Mediterranean concepts and experiences of clime and universal space.

In the 16th century, wayward Iberians had encountered high civilisations in the Andes that exhibited both uncannily familiar and notably distinct concepts and patterns of human and plant settlement. Although ‘markets’ or meeting places for the exchange of exotic goods existed in the northern Andes (today’s Ecuador and Colombia), in the central and southern reaches of the expansive mountain range (today’s Peru, Bolivia, northern Argentina and Chile) access to ‘exotic’ commodities produced in adjacent ecological zones was obtained via intricate networks of transhumant settlements occupying complementary ecological niches and exchanging goods produced or gathered in each niche. Seasonally migrant and resettled populations produced fissiparous communities deployed in what ethnohistorians have called ‘vertical archipelagos’ distributed up and down the Andean slopes to the west and east of the twin north–south ranges or cordilleras, thereby reaching down to the subtropical and tropical zones, both arid and humid, of the Pacific Coast and the Amazon basin. In the Andean valleys that lie nestled between the cordilleras, called Quechua in Runa Simi or the ‘human tongue’ of the region, the climate was temperate. Indeed, the word for ‘temperate valley’ came to be associated with the language of the Andes (although linguistic research suggests that its origins are in the Upper Amazon or chawpi yunga zone to the east of the cordilleras), and as a result, non-native speakers then and now call the language ‘Quechua’ or ‘Quichua’. The Inca state was indeed centred on this Quechua climatic zone, but it extended far and wide in vertical fashion into adjacent puna, chawpi and yunga zones.

In the 16th century, theological and practical concerns of conversion and tribute collection stimulated the production of works of natural history and geography. Often based on official inspections or visitas and questionnaires, these works contributed to theoretical and practical knowledge of microcosmic tropical verticality. Colonial authorities took advantage of Andean spatial arrangements and calendrics for labour mobilisation to mines, farms and mills, and for the organisation of tribute collection and trade. The rich diversity of ecological niches and natural products described in these primary sources prompted early modern scholars to associate Peru or South America with the biblical Paradise. Paradise, it was thought, had once contained all the fauna and flora of the earth. In efforts to recreate this primeval space of Edenic bounty, Renaissance or early modern naturalists established botanical gardens and curiosity cabinets. In the early modern period of the first globalisation, mountains were second only to botanical gardens as sites for envisioning Paradise. Steep equatorial slopes with cascading microclimates that reproduced the conditions of the rest of the world, however, were not bygone prehistoric spaces. They could be found in South America. Columbus was perhaps the first to speculate that the verdant ‘Indian’ lands he had encountered across the sea had been home to the biblical Garden of Eden. Like his contemporaries, Columbus held that Paradise was at the top of an extremely tall mountain, the nipple of a breast-shaped peak that reached beyond the sublunary sphere. To be perfect, Paradise had to transcend the laws of physics, and in classical cosmology heavenly matter in the celestial sphere was not subject to change. Only above the spheres of earth, water, air and fire could the generation and transmutation of the elements be avoided.

Modern Mediterranean soldiers and savants did not find peaks in the New World so tall as to be impervious to the laws of matter in the sublunary sphere. Nevertheless, they found in the Andes a means to explain why temperate climes appeared in the torrid zone when the ancients had predicted that this ‘burnt zone’ or Perusta (the Latin term found on medieval maps) would be uninhabitable owing to the scorching heat of the equatorial sun. Intrepid Jesuit naturalists who spent many years in the New World, such as José de Acosta, held the Andes in awe as they discovered that climate was as much a function of elevation and microclimate as it was of latitude. Although Acosta laughed at Aristotle, he and many other Iberian savants continued to consult his meteorological concepts, particularly those relating to the spheres and vapours. Juan de Cárdenas, in his 1591 Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias, and Bernardo de Vargas Machuca (1557–1622), saw the Andes as rising into the second sphere of cold air, where the intense rays of the equatorial sun produced vapours arising from shaded areas, shallow lakes and underground cavities, creating variable and habitable, often temperate conditions. Acosta further reasoned that the tropical oceans themselves, combined with winds, generated massive amounts of vapour that spread across the land, moderating temperatures there.

The first author to make an explicit connection between slope and ecological diversity was probably the Peruvian Creole Antonio de León Pinelo (1590–1660), who was educated in the Jesuit College of Lima before beginning a brilliant career in the imperial administration of the worldwide Hispanic realm in Spain. León Pinelo’s El Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo: comentario apologético, historia natural y peregrina de las Yndias Occidentales, yslas y tierra firme del mar océano sought to prove that Paradise had been located on the eastern slopes of the Andes (Figure 2).² León Pinelo’s work grew out of his dissatisfaction with all the extant literature that had attempted to pin down the original position of the Garden of Eden. Ancient learned consensus held that Paradise had been situated somewhere in the Middle East or Asia. León Pinelo dismissed both new and old theories, arguing that the correct reading of Genesis placed paradise in the Andes. León Pinelo was sceptical that paradise could have been on top of a mountain, however, for life in the Andes proved that the thin air of very high altitudes made breathing difficult and plant life scarce. Nevertheless, the Peruvian Creole maintained that of all places in the world, only the Andes could have reached the middle region of the sphere of air, where corruption and the transformation of the elements were considerably retarded. In addition, the Andes allowed him to explain how it was that a place near the equator, which should have been rendered uninhabitable by the scorching heat of the sun, was in fact the most temperate environment on earth. Andean heights offset the tropical position of Peru on the terrestrial sphere, yielding a perfect meteorological balance in the high valleys. León Pinelo identified three habitat zones in the Andes, each distinctively rich in its own way: the low-lying areas of the coastal plain and the Amazon basin, the mid-altitude plains or llanos, and the high-altitude sierras. León Pinelo’s scheme drew upon Jesuit observations, but these were likely informed by Quechua classifications, which in most cases, then and now, named four zones: yunga or hot lowlands; chawpi or intermediate, subtropical slope; quechua or high temperate valley; and puna or cold alpine grassland or tundra. These altitudinal ecological niches or ‘floors’ rendered Peru particularly productive, for when one crop or fodder withered at one elevation, another flourished at another. The various niches also lent themselves to seasonal activities, including herding of livestock, fishing and hunting or corralling camelids. Its many microclimates across these zones made Peru hospitable to nearly all crops and products and to year-round productivity. Thus, whereas some American plants were not easily acclimatised in Europe, all European crops yielded harvests in Peru, claimed León Pinelo.

León Pinelo’s natural history was chiefly concerned with cataloguing wonders and curiosities, not with thinking broadly about ways in which the microcosmic attributes of Andean space could be used to generate wealth. His forceful, patriotic and theological argument seemed disconnected from a discourse on political economy, perhaps because the economic concerns of his age were rather different. It fell to 18th-century Peruvian and European intellectuals to undertake this task in systematic fashion. But León Pinelo was not irrelevant to this enlightened effort. His manuscript, which included notes and maps, was carried to Spain by the Peruvian natural historian José Eusebio Llano Zapata, who would make it available to the transoceanic Bourbon project of political economic reform across the empire. A copy of León Pinelo’s manuscript was made in Cadiz, and that copy rests today in the Royal Library in Madrid. A similar fate awaited that manuscript’s enlightened purveyor, Llano Zapata, whose work was similarly archived and forgotten, in this case in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid, until it was recovered, properly identified and finally published in the late 20th century.

In northern and central Europe, so-called cameralist or statist discourses, often created and funded by princes, mining or engineering schools, academies and botanical gardens, sought to transform the polity into a self-sufficient economy. Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), for example, deployed the ancient image of Paradise as an equatorial mountain to explain biodistribution and secure support for state-building projects. Linnaeus imagined Paradise to have been a very tall equatorial peak with a multitude of climates. The many microclimates of this mountain had once sustained all the fauna and flora of the world, he thought. As the oceans had receded, however, species had begun to colonise distant geographical regions, from the tropics to the Arctic, as they sought environments that resembled the niches in Paradise for which they had originally been designed. Linnaeus thus sent students abroad to collect flora in the hope of reassembling Eden and thereby weaning his polity from its dependency on imports. Trained naturalists would provide, through careful acclimatisation of exotic plants in botanical gardens, the raw materials needed for the Kingdom of Sweden to become an Edenic mountain in the north.

A similar cameralist discourse, in this case based in Saxony and Prussian Franconia and focused on mining as well as collecting plants, informed Humboldt and Bonpland’s famous profile or vertical section of Chimborazo (Figure 1). Humboldt’s field research practice connected underground (mining) and over-ground (botanical) mapping of natural resources, producing a penetrating vision of entire countries (in this case, Quito or Ecuador) as mines and agricultural zones that could be exploited by foreign interests.

Creole savants in the Andes did not have to send naturalists abroad to map and exploit such a wealth of resources, although they did sometimes benefit from expeditions from afar that they hosted and in some cases guided and, in others, purposefully misguided. Creoles could simply turn with renewed enthusiasm to the scientific study of the microcosm at hand, in the process often engaging and critiquing armchair European theory about the American clime. Unlike Linnaeus, however, most enlightened Creole intellectuals and political economists did not seek to make their kingdom’s economies autarkic until after the wars of independence in the 1820s. In the 18th century, many sought instead to reinvigorate their rich kingdoms as emporiums of world trade within the increasingly free-trade-oriented Hispanic empire of the Bourbons, by exploiting more fully the microcosmic ecological and resource attributes of the Andes. A flurry of debates on how best to harness the riches of the Andes followed, with unprecedented investment in natural history and the subsequent dissemination of knowledge, on the part of both the Hispanic crown and the American viceroyalties, where venerable universities and academic societies were well established. Naturalists now sought to benefit the local and imperial economies by identifying new mines and mining technologies as well as botanical and agrarian products (dyes, spices, woods, gums, pharmaceuticals, llamas, vicunas, coca, cinchona bark, etc.) that could supplant those imported from Asia or monopolised by rival powers such as the French, Dutch and British and their Indies trading companies.

The microcosmic attributes of the Andes prompted Colombian savant Francisco José de Caldas to present New Granada as a natural laboratory for the study not only of natural products but of the microcosmic relations between behaviour, race and climate. In addition, New Granada (which then included Panama, Venezuela and Quito) was geographically privileged to be a world trade emporium, a new Tyre or Alexandria. The vast country was located at the centre of the world and equipped with navigable rivers to carry staples from the interior to the coast, as well as with ports facing both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Many of the efforts of the expedition of the Cadiz-born, New Granada–based botanist José Celestino Mutis, for example, were driven by the assumption that similar environments engendered similar botanical species and that the Andes constituted a treasure trove of microclimates, as Caldas had insisted. Thus, in 1785 Mutis claimed to have found in Colombia a substitute for Asian tea. He launched a campaign to convince imperial authorities that this Colombian product was as good as if not better than the tea Europeans consumed and were importing from China. Behind these efforts lay the idea that the Colombian Andes could furnish the world with all the products it desired.

Peru had always been a hotbed of natural historical and political economic thinking about natural and human diversity. Enlightened polymath José Hipólito Unanue (1755–1833), a member of the Lima academic society that edited the Mercurio Peruano (1791–5), author of the annual Statistical Survey of Peru under the viceroys, and Peru’s first minister under San Martín and Bolívar, gave León Pinelo’s old ideas of the Peruvian paradise a more rigorous, scientific foundation. Although Unanue was ready to note that ‘God brought together in Peru all the productions he had dispersed in the other three continents … creating [in Peru] a temple for himself worthy of his immensity’, he and his colleagues in Lima proceeded to document these productions in enlightened, scientific fashion, producing statistics, essays, maps, natural histories and learned treatises. Creole erudition at the centre of the Viceroyalty of Peru in the 18th century did not reduce the genius and diversity of the Andean world to a single mountain. Although Peru’s fabled mineral wealth (above all, Potosí) and Inca civilisation were renewable themes, to demonstrate the country’s native wealth, genius and universal potential, Peruvian intellectuals more often set their sights on the iconic but polemical figure of Manco Capac, the founding Inca emperor. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Manco Capac was the ethnological ‘Chimborazo’ of the so-called dispute of the New World, a fierce debate about the origins and status of New World nature and civilisation. Most European savants speculated that Manco Capac must have been of ‘foreign’ origin (Voltaire thought he was an ancient white immigrant who arrived via the Canary Islands, much as Columbus had). Humboldt, on the other hand, traced the distant origins and ‘laws’ of New World civilization to Asia. On this score, Unanue clearly disagreed with, and indeed was far ahead of, Humboldt’s thinking and that of the French philosophes.

Although it is surely true that Humboldt was deeply marked by his American voyage, many aspects of his thought are more readily traced not only to German cameralist mining discourse, as we have noted, but also to the neoclassical aesthetics of the German Enlightenment, with its notable Hellenophilia and its studied orientalism. This orientation, exemplified by the art historical thought of Johann Joaquim Winkelmann (see ‘Xilonen’ in this volume), generally held that the ancient Greeks were the measure of nearly all things, including race, beauty, civilisation and intellect; ancient oriental civilisation was also noteworthy for its great antiquity and because it was the likely point of origin of peoples and languages that later populated the West. For Humboldt, American civilisation was in most ways ‘Asiatic’ in style and spirit, and thus inferior to Western civilisation and its more refined, figural and individualist aesthetics. Humboldt thought its ‘semi-civilisation’ was probably derived from the ancient Orient via the migrations of Eastern sages to the New World. He thus speculated (and he was not alone in this) that Manco Capac, the first Inca, was likely a wandering Brahmin. Unanue was of a very different mind and aesthetic. For him, Manco Capac and his laws were demonstrably Peruvian, not Asiatic. He argued that only a native Peruvian genius could have designed such perfect laws for the land, in tune with its unparalleled natural and cultural diversity. Manco could do this because his nerve endings housed rapid-firing receptors whose sensitivity had been heightened by the equatorial sun and softened by the high-altitude, temperate clime of Andean South America. Unanue’s physiological view that Manco Capac’s genius was native to Peru was based on a science of Andean verticality. It was also a critique of Montesquieu’s longitudinal environmental determinism (the notion that the civilisation and genius of whole regions were favoured or hindered by climes) and of European racialist thinking at large. In Unanue’s words, modern Europeans had ‘reduced genius to the curvature of the brow’ based on a Greek model of perfection that had little or nothing to do with modern European or indeed ancient Greek reality. For Unanue, America, Africa and Asia were the true homes of civilisation, blessed by generous and diverse climes, whereas northern Europe was an upstart ingrate that now pretended to be ‘the Tribunal of History’ when in reality it owed the little civilisation it had to the Arab and Hispanic world of the Mediterranean.

Unanue’s natural science and vision of history clearly distinguished him from Humboldt and most other European Enlightenment thinkers. Other Creole savants in the Andes held similar if less sophisticated views. Creole natural historical thinking in Quito, for example, came to focus on Chimborazo as a sign of its universality and sovereignty. A province and kingdom under the Incas that for a short time had been a northern capital of the crusading Inca Atahualpa, son of Huayna Capac, and then an audiencia or high court under the Peruvian viceroyalty based in Lima, Quito had become part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717. Nevertheless, local elites maintained a strong sense of its independence. Writing in the 1780s, the exiled Jesuit Creole Juan de Velasco argued that the Kingdom of Quito’s natural sovereignty was evidenced by the fact that it was home to the world’s largest bird (the condor), its widest river (the Amazon) and highest peak (Chimborazo). Bolívar continued in this Creole tradition in his famous ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’. Having ascended from the tropical river of Orinoco to the plant-free, eternal snows of the highest of mountains, he took poetic flight from this world, encountering the son of Mother Eternity herself, a god named Colombia. Descending back to his manhood, he resumed his struggle to liberate the earthly ‘Colombia’ (a gloss for all of America) from the vile Spaniards who still held Peru.³

After 1845, the topical or poetic elements of the old notion of Andean verticality present in the writings of Velasco and Bolívar would find their way into the design of the coat of arms of the Republic of Ecuador (Figure 3). Here the Amazon or Orinoco would be displaced by the Guayas River, marking the importance to Ecuador of the Pacific port of Guayaquil. The mighty condor and Chimborazo would continue to reign over the republic named after a precise line drawn by Enlightenment science. These native, natural symbols resonated with an intellectual tradition of tropical verticality that thrived long before Humboldt and continues to thrive today.

FURTHER READING

Anthony, P. (2018) ‘Mining as the working world of Alexander von Humboldt’s plant geography and vertical cartography’, Isis, 109 (1): 28–55.

Cañizares-Esguerra, J. (2006) Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Cañizares-Esguerra, J. (2004) ‘How derivative was Humboldt? Microcosmic nature narratives in early modern Spanish America and the (other) origins of Humboldt’s ecological ideas’, in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by L. Schiebinger and C. Swan, 148–65 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Cañizares-Esguerra, J. (2001) How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Masuda, S., I. Shimada, and C. Morris (eds.) (1985) Andean Ecology and Civilization: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Andean Ecological Complementarity (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press).

Murra, J.V. (1956) The Economic Organization of the Inca State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Thurner, M. (2011) History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida).

¹ S. Bolívar, ‘Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo’ (1822).

² A. León Pinelo, El Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo: comentario apologético, historia natural y peregrina de las Yndias Occidentales, yslas y tierra firme del mar océano (Madrid, 1656).

³ S. Bolívar, ‘Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo’ (1822).