Torrid zone

---

title: "Torrid zone" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["cartography", "maritime-folklore", "maritime-history-of-portugal", "portuguese-exploration-in-the-age-of-discovery"] description: "Equatorial region of Earth thought to be uninhabitable by classical scholars" topic_path: "geography" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrid_zone" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Equatorial region of Earth thought to be uninhabitable by classical scholars ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Crates_Terrestrial_Sphere.png" caption="150}} BCE), showing land masses in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the western hemisphere"] ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/World_map_indicating_tropics_and_subtropics.png" caption="Modern world map with the intertropical zone highlighted in [[crimson"] ::

The torrid zone was the name given by ancient Greek and Roman geographers to the equatorial area of the Earth, so hot that it was thought to be impenetrable to sailors or explorers. That notion became a deterrent for European explorers until the 15th century.

Origin

Aristotle, like all classical thinkers, knew that the world was a sphere. He posited that the western half of the temperate zone on the other side of the globe from Greece might be habitable and that, because of symmetry, there must be in the Southern Hemisphere a temperate zone corresponding to that in the northern. He thought, however, that the excessive heat in the torrid zone would prevent the exploration.

Strabo referred to:

::quote

::

In 8 AD the poet Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses.

::quote ...the celestial vault is cut by two zones on the right and two on the left, and there is a fifth zone between, hotter than these [i.e., the Milky Way], so did [[Providentia ::

Pomponius Mela, the first Roman geographer, asserted that the Earth had two habitable zones, a north and a south one. The second population were known as Antichthones. However, it would be impossible to get into contact with each other because of the unbearable heat at the equator (De situ orbis 1.4). The term torrid is from Latin torridus, "burned, parched."

Proved wrong

Many Europeans had assumed that Cape Bojador, in Western Sahara, marked the beginning of the impenetrable torrid zone until 1434, when the Portuguese sailed past the cape and reported that no torrid zone existed.

References

References

1. (April 1999). "The Classification of Climates from Pythagoras to Koeppen". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
2. "GEOGRAPHY".
3. "Metamorphoses, Book I".
4. "A Grammatical Dictionary of Botanical Latin".
5. (2015). "Voyages in World History, Brief". Cengage Learning.

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::