Location: Turrialba County, Cartago province Map
Elevation: 3,340 m (10,958 ft)
Turrialba Volcano is located in the Turrialba County, Cartago province of Costa Rica. The name of the volcano rises comes from the Latin Turris Alba which means “white flower”. The summit of Turrialba Volcano rises at an elevation of 3340 meters (10,958 feet). Turrialba is a stratovolcano or volcano that consists of several layers or strata. Large five eruptions in the past 3500 years left three craters. One is filled with fumaroles and sulfur pits. The last eruption occurred in 1866 and even thought the volcano is deemed active tourists can descent into a crater. Besides biking is very popular here and thousands of tourists come here to try steep slopes of the volcano.
Place names
The name of the Turrialba volcano
is written in ancient documents in various forms: Turiarba,
Turrialva, Turriarva, Turi alba, Torralba, Torialba and Zuriarba.
One of the legends about the origin of its name, turns the word
Turrialba into a derivation of "torre alba" (white tower), name with
which, according to the legend, the Spaniards gave him when
observing the column of white smoke that emerges from the crater of
the volcano.
However, more recent ethnohistorical research
has determined that the name is of indigenous origin, possibly from
the Huetar language. According to González, the prefix Turru or Turu
is frequent in many words in this language: Turrúcares, Turrubares,
etc., while the ending ral - later Spanishized to ra - is found in
place-names such as Curriara, Mayara and Barra. For the writer and
linguist Carlos Gagini, the first mention of the name Turrialba
dates from 1569, written Turrialva or Turiarba, and in 1608 as
Zurriarba. For Gagini, the etymology comes from Aztec tullin, junco
or tule, which the huetars pronounced turin, or else, from a word
composed of the Tarascan language, turiri, fire, and aban, river,
that is, river of fire, possibly in allusion to lava flows. For
Sandner, the original word was Turriarva.
Another hypothesis
states that the word Turrialba is not of origin huetar, but comes
from the Cabécar language, specifically a word with the suffix Batá,
which in that language is used to indicate extreme or ultimate
conditions, alluding to that, from northwest to southeast, the
Turrialba volcano is the last of the great active volcanoes of the
Central Volcanic Mountain Range.
In other documents, the
mountain has been called by other names. Tristán mentions that in a
document of 1820, it is given the name of Pan de Suerre, in
reference to the term Suerre, an ancient civilization of the
Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, and the indigenous name of the
Reventazón River. Suerre was also the name that, in the
pre-Columbian era, was given to the mountainous set of the Irazú
volcano and the Turrialba, as well as Cuerizú was the pre-Columbian
name of the Poás volcano and the Guararí hill, secondary cone of the
Barva volcano.