Ecuador contains Mount Chimborazo, Earth’s closest point to space.
Chimborazo is an inactive stratovolcano in Ecuador’s Cordillera Occidental. Its summit reaches 6,263 metres above sea level, but the planet’s equatorial bulge makes the summit farther from Earth’s center than the summit of Mount Everest.
The mountain lies only about one degree south of the Equator. Earth is not a perfect sphere: rotation causes it to bulge around the Equator, giving equatorial peaks a positional advantage in distance from the center of the planet.
Chimborazo is not the highest mountain above sea level; Everest holds that record. The distinction is geometric: Chimborazo’s summit is the point on Earth’s surface farthest from Earth’s center and therefore, in that sense, closest to outer space.