Mondo Knows Facts
A Peruvian gold-mining town is the highest permanent settlement
La Rinconada sits at about 5,100 metres in the Andes
La Rinconada grew around a gold mine on a glacier below the Peruvian Andes, and residents live above 5,000 metres where oxygen is roughly half the sea-level concentration. Many workers come for short rotations rather than settling permanently, and the town has no plumbing or sewage system. It is the highest place of its size on Earth.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: peru, altitude, mining
A Peruvian gold-mining town is the highest permanent settlement: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- La Rinconada sits at about 5,100 metres in the Andes. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a records & extremes fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Records & Extremes shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.