On this day in 1999, Galician mountaineer Chus Lago became the second woman in history and the first Spanish woman to summit Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen.
Chus Lago discovered the mountains through her father. At age 11, she climbed Vixiador (a hill near Vigo) for the first time and continued in the Pyrenees, the Andes, Kenya, and the Himalayas, a mountain range she discovered at age 22, at the foot of Annapurna, where she began her quest to reach great peaks.
In 1992, she was part of a Galician expedition to Everest, but internal problems prevented Chus from reaching the summit. Two years after summiting Cho Oyu in 1997, her first eight-thousander, Chus Lago resumed her project to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen. After coming close to success in 1998, she returned the following season.
On May 26, 1999, he reached the summit of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, an impressive achievement that marked a milestone in the world of climbing. This feat had also been accomplished by British climber Alison Hargreaves and American climber Francys Arsentiev in previous years. On the expedition, Lago was assisted only by a Tibetan climber.
In January 2009, she became the first Spanish woman to reach the South Pole after a 59-day solo trek across Antarctica. The experience, filmed with a camera the mountaineer herself carried, was chronicled by her cousin on a blog. The documentary Chus Lago: Alone Before the Ice aired in April 2009 on Canal+.
Lago has published four books: Everest, Beyond the Earth (Laverde, 2000), in which she describes her first feat in detail; the children’s story Fata and Pengba on Machapuchare (Desnivel, 2010); Stretching with Chus Lago (Desnivel, 2012); And On the Footsteps of Giants (Aguilar, 2016), which recounts the mountaineer’s solo, foot trek across Antarctica to reach the geographic South Pole: 1,200 kilometers in 59 days.
In On the Footsteps of Giants, she narrates not only her own adventure but also the story of the giants, those intrepid explorers who ventured on the same expedition before her. Above all, however, she reminisces about family and adventure experiences with her companion, Merab, who died in 2005, and to whom she pays a moving tribute.
In the 2007 municipal elections, she ran for the PSdeG-PSOE list for the Vigo City Council as number two on a list headed by Abel Caballero and, since then, she has been the Environment Councillor until today, the day on which she has completed her term and decided to leave politics, “not definitively”, to go with her family to live in the United States to start a new work and life project.