Geography
There are more than 20 peaks over 3,000 meters, with the highest being Mulhacén (3479 m), Veleta (3396 m) and Alcazaba (3371 m). The rivers that rise on the north face of the range feed the Guadalquivir basin, the most important ones being the Fardes and Genil. Meanwhile, the rivers that rise on the west and south faces run down into the Mediterranean. These include the Dúrcal, Ízbor, Trevélez and Poqueira, which are all tributaries of the Guadalfeo, which itself rises in the Sierra Nevada, and the Adra and Andarax, with their tributaries. The south and west faces are where you will find the majority of the almost 50 high-mountain lakes that exist in the Sierra Nevada, many of which are also the sources of streams and rivers. Much of the landscape, particularly above 2,400 metres (which was the perpetual snow line prior to the Holocene period) was shaped by the action of glaciers, resulting in characteristic U-shaped valleys.
Read more about this topic: Sierra Nevada National Park (Spain)
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)