Popocatepetl
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
po-po'kat-a-pa'tl, a volcanic mountain of southern Mexico. The name is Aztec, meaning smoking mountain. It is situated in the province of Pueblo. Although nearly fifty miles distant, it may be seen clearly from the city of Mexico. It is 17,783 feet high. Its lower slopes are clothed with oak and pine forests to a height of about 12,500 feet. A barren zone of sand and sulphur is succeeded by a cap of snow, from the middle of which ascends a perpetual fan-shaped discharge of steam and ash-like material. Occasionally slag and stone are thrown out. The crater is circular. It is about 250 feet deep and about three-fourths of a mile in diameter. Ever since the days of the Aztecs the Mexicans have ascended the "smoking mountain" to obtain sulphur. In 1904 a New York capitalist purchased the mountain of its Mexican owner for, it was said, half a million dollars. It was his purpose to build a cog-wheeled railroad from the base to the summit, to be operated by an electric power plant at the base. Ice was to be transported from the upper slopes to the city of Mexico. The largest forest at the base was to be converted into a park and hotels were to be built. It is estimated that there are 148,000,000 tons of sulphur in the crater, and that the supply is increasing at the rate of one per cent annually. The new proprietors proposed to place this sulphur on the market. After struggling with the proposition for two or three years the American purchasers were unable to finance the project and the mountain went back to its former owner. See Sulphur ; Mexico
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 the mountain was a mildly steaming curiosity whose crater was being valued as a sulphur mine, and Mexicans still climbed it for sulphur as they had since Aztec times. Popocatépetl fell quiet after 1927 and became a popular climb, then reawakened in December 1994 with the first of a long series of ash eruptions that continues today; the summit has been closed to climbers ever since, an exclusion zone surrounds it, and villages on its flanks have been evacuated repeatedly, most notably in 1994 and 2000. The snow cap that Aiton's described has gone: the summit glaciers, thinned by volcanic heat and a warming climate, were declared extinct in 2001. The mountain is now permanently instrumented and watched by Mexico's national disaster-prevention centre, since some 25 million people live within about 100 km of it; its height is usually given as 5,426 m (17,802 ft), close to the old figure, and it lies on the borders of Puebla, Morelos and the State of Mexico.
Written for this edition, 2026.