National Awakening: Nicolás Martínez and the 1906 Ascent of Antisana

Reclaiming the Cordillera

For more than a century after Humboldt’s 1802 climb, high-altitude exploration in the Ecuadorian Andes had been dominated almost entirely by foreign expeditions. European naturalists—Humboldt, Reiss, Stübel, Whymper—arrived with Swiss or Italian guides, climbed the great volcanic giants, and published their memoirs in London, Paris, or Berlin. A pervasive colonial myth endured: that native South Americans lacked the scientific acumen and technical daring to master their own high cordilleras.

One man was determined to smash that myth forever: Augusto Nicolás Martínez Vásconez (1860–1934). Born in Ambato at the base of Tungurahua, Martínez was a brilliant polymath—geologist, astronomer, meteorologist, and passionate explorer. He had spent decades venturing into active volcanic craters, studying eruptions of Tungurahua, and making ascents of Cotopaxi and Pichincha.

Martínez set his sights on Volcán Antisana (5,753 m). Because Whymper had required the finest alpine guides in Europe to navigate Antisana’s chaotic icefalls twenty-six years earlier, the mountain was regarded as the ultimate test of mountaineering mastery. Martínez resolved to lead an all-Ecuadorian expedition to the summit without foreign assistance.

“Our mountains belong to us. It is our duty as sons of this soil to conquer their summits, chart their glaciers, and study their nature.” — Nicolás Martínez, Ascensiones a los Andes Ecuatorianos

The Expedition of March 1906

In early March 1906, Martínez assembled a small team of trusted Ecuadorian companions, including Alejandro Villacreses and Manuel Villacreses. Departing from the town of Pintag, they loaded mules with camping supplies, meteorological equipment, heavy glass-plate cameras, and locally forged ice crampons.

Braving torrential paramo rains, the team established their high camp near Laguna Santa Lucía at 4,500 metres. On the freezing pre-dawn of March 15, 1906, roped together with sturdy hemp lines, Martínez and his companions stepped onto Antisana’s southern glacier.

Unlike Whymper’s well-provisioned party, the Ecuadorians had to rely purely on their own route-finding instinct. Martínez read the glacier with extraordinary skill, weaving between towering seracs, navigating bottomless crevasse chasms, and finding safe passage across fragile snow bridges. When faced with steep 50-degree firn headwalls, the climbers chopped steps with determination, fighting the debilitating effects of thin equatorial air.

Triumph on the Ice Dome

At midday on March 15, 1906, Nicolás Martínez and the Villacreses companions breached the final glacier ramp and stood victorious on the main summit of Volcán Antisana at 5,753 metres.

The emotional impact was profound. For the first time in history, an all-Ecuadorian team stood atop one of the most formidable glaciated volcanic massifs in the Americas. Martínez spent more than an hour on the summit, taking barometric pressure readings, measuring air temperatures, and capturing historic glass-plate photographs of the surrounding cordillera.

Their successful descent and return to Quito sparked widespread national celebration. Martínez documented the expedition in his seminal work, Ascensiones a los Andes Ecuatorianos (1907), which became the founding manifesto of Ecuadorian mountaineering. By proving that national climbers were equal to the greatest mountains on Earth, Nicolás Martínez earned his immortal title as the Father of Ecuadorian Mountaineering.