Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Sierra Nevado Of
Santa Marta Is Encompassed Within Two Divergent Branches Of The Andes,
That Of Bogota, And That Of The Isthmus Of Panama.
It rises abruptly
like a fortified castle, amidst the plains extending from the gulf of
Darien, by the mouth of the Magdalena, to the lake of Maracaybo.
The
old geographers erroneously considered this insulated group of
mountains covered with eternal snow, as the extremity of the high
Cordilleras of Chita and Pamplona. The loftiest ridge of the Sierra
Nevada de Santa Marta is only three or four leagues in length from
east to west; it is bounded (at nine leagues distance from the coast)
by the meridians of the capes of San Diego and San Augustin. The
culminant points, called El Picacho and Horqueta, are near the western
border of the group; they are entirely separated from the peak of San
Lorenzo, also covered with eternal snow, but only four leagues distant
from the port of Santa Marta, towards the south-east. I saw this
latter peak from the heights that surrounded the village of Turbaco,
south of Carthagena. No precise measurement has hitherto given us the
height of the Sierra Nevada, which Dampier affirms to be one of the
highest mountains of the northern hemisphere. Calculations founded on
the maximum of distance at which the group is discerned at sea, give a
height of more than 3004 toises. That the group of the mountains of
Santa Marta is insulated is proved by the hot climate of the lands
(tierras calientes) that surround it. Low ridges and a succession of
hills indicate, perhaps, an ancient connection between the Sierra
Nevada de Santa Marta on one side, by the Alto de las Minas, with the
phonolitic and granitic rocks of the Penon and Banca, and on the
other, by the Sierra de Perija, with the mountains of Chiliguana and
Ocana, which are the spurs of the eastern chain of the Andes of New
Grenada. In this latter chain, the febrifuge species of cinchona
(corollis hirsutis, staminibus inclusis) are found in the Sierra
Nevada de Merida; but the real cinchona, the most northern of South
America, is found in the temperate region of the Sierra Nevada de
Santa Marta.
3. LITTORAL CHAIN OF VENEZUELA.
This is the system of mountains the configuration and direction of
which have excited so powerful an influence on the cultivation and
commerce of the ancient Capitania General of Venezuela. It bears
different names, as the mountains of Coro, of Caracas, of the
Bergantin, of Barcelona, of Cumana, and of Paria; but all these names
belong to the same chain, of which the northern part runs along the
coast of the Caribbean Sea. This system of mountains, which is 160
leagues long,* is a prolongation of the eastern Cordillera of the
Andes of Cundinamarca. (* It is more than double the length of the
Pyrenees, from Cape Creux to the point of Figuera.) There is an
immediate connection of the littoral chain with the Andes, like that
of the Pyrenees with the mountains of Asturia and Galicia; it is not
the effect of transversal ridges, like the connection of the Pyrenees
with the Swiss Alps, by the Black Mountain and the Cevennes.
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