Qualla: Cerro El Plomo

Cerro El Plomo: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lion Hirth (User:Prissantenbär), Public domain. On a clear day, Santiago's six million residents look up at Cerro El Plomo without always knowing its name. At 5,444 meters - just over 17,860 feet - it is the highest peak visible from the city, a wall of rock and snow standing guard above the smog and the streets. For most of the year it is simply scenery. But near its frozen summit, the mountain held something for nearly five hundred years: a boy of perhaps eight or nine, dressed in fine red wool, his hair braided into more than two hundred plaits, sitting in the ice exactly as he had been left by the Inca.

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Image: Lion Hirth (User:Prissantenbär) | Public domain

Cerro El Plomo: A Mountain the Inca Climbed

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit chripell, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Inca Empire reached deep into central Chile in the fifteenth century, and to its people the high peaks were sacred - dwellings of mountain spirits, the apus, that demanded reverence. The Inca climbed Cerro El Plomo periodically, hauling themselves and their offerings above 5,...

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Image: chripell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cerro El Plomo: The Child of El Plomo

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WeHaKa, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1954, three Chilean arrieros - muleteers named Guillermo Chacón Carrasco, Jaime Ríos Abarca, and Luis Gerardo Ríos Barrueto - searching the mountain came upon a grave near the summit and found the boy. He had been the subject of a capacocha, an Inca rite the Quechua called qha...

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Image: WeHaKa | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cerro El Plomo: What the Ice Preserved

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beatriz Posada Alonso, CC BY-SA 3.0. The cold had kept him almost perfectly. His internal organs were intact, the tissue beneath his skin still soft. His face was painted with red and ochre stripes, and his hair had been carefully styled into over two hundred small braids - a level of preservation that let researche...

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Image: Beatriz Posada Alonso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cerro El Plomo: The Mountain Keeps Its Dead

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tijs Michels, CC BY-SA 3.0. The boy is not the only one El Plomo has held. On July 16, 1932, a Pan American-Grace Airways Ford Trimotor named San José, flying from Santiago to Mendoza, was caught in a savage snowstorm and crashed into the mountain, killing all nine aboard. Buried in ice and snow, the wreck ...

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Image: Tijs Michels | CC BY-SA 3.0