How many mountains are there in the world?!

There are 1,000,809 mountains in the world!

This the latest number straight from the PeakVisor lab which counts all the mountains which have names and enjoy over 1 meter prominence. (Updated: August 25, 2018)

Monte Disgrazia, one of 1,000,809 mountains in the world!

Here are some numbers for particular countries:

The United States - 73,389 named mountains

Italy - 28,214 named mountains

Switzerland - 9,944 named mountains

How does PeakVisor count the mountains?

After weeks of grinding through numerous datasets in various formats, our team came up with this answer. As the process of mountain formation is far from being completely finished the number might change. Also, scientists, researchers, and mountaineers keep exploring, and bringing improvements to available databases. So, we expect this only to grow.

You might read about the data sources we use in our work on our PeakVisor under the hood page. Basically, we compile a global high precision Digital Elevation Model from several sources. After that we go through the data in OpenStreetMaps, GeoNames, SwissNAME3D, and other national toponymic databases, and merge them into one global dataset of geographical features. Finally, we confirm the mountains with our Digital Elevation Model and calculate their prominences.

You can explore all these 1,000,809 mountains in PeakVisor Mountains Explorer. For example here is the list of 215 peaks in the Province of Como, Lombardy, Italy to start with.

Now we are thinking of finding all the UNNAMED mountains in the world, counting them, and compiling a ToDo list for the global mountaineers community!