Discover: How did Guilin's Mountains Formed

The mountains of Guilin are one of the most evocative karst landscapes of the enormous variety of landscapes that China offers.

The mountains of Guilin create one of the most surprising and beautiful pictures of the thousand and one magical images that a trip to China can offer. Mountains pierced inside by karst cavities, overflowing with green vegetation on its slopes and with the entire city of Guilin at his feet, among which meanders the course of the Li River.

The origin of the Guilin Mountains

Next, we are going to give you more information about the mountains of Guilin, telling you everything that awaits you there. But let's start at the beginning, that is, with their origins and how they were formed. To do this, we have to go back hundreds of millions of years in time.

We are in a karst area, similar to others that can be seen on the Asian continent, for example, certain parts of the countryside of Vietnam. Well, the beginning of this magnificent landscape takes us back to a very distant time when this entire Chinese plateau was covered by an inland sea, in whose bottoms huge limestone deposits accumulated.

But later, the tectonic movements that have progressively shaped our planet, made the waters disappear and thus those limestone rocks emerged in the form of mountains. Although the process had not yet finished, since the factor of continuous erosion was still missing to give the current appearance to the mountains of Guilin.

Bird's eye view of Guilin mountains

The area view is one of the most spectacular you can have of the mountains of Guilin. In fact, surely many of you have seen this corner of China on countless occasions, as it is an iconic image among the most common screensavers of the Windows 10 operating system.

Guilin mountains from the river

However, although the zenithal view is imposing, the image obtained from land should not be underestimated either. Or rather, from the water, from the course of the Li River, which crosses the entire landscape of the city and zigzags between the mountains of Guilin.

And in fact, the most common thing to do is to embark in the city of Guilin itself on a short river cruise. It is clearly not the most famous cruise in China, with the Yangtze River in the lead, but the itinerary along the Li River is unforgettable.

It is an activity that will take you about 7 or 8 hours at the most. A time in which you will save the 80 kilometers that, approximately, separate the city from the beautiful town of Yangshuo. And many who have done this river tour describe it as the perfect opportunity to immerse themselves in a fairytale landscape through which progresses as slowly as pleasantly.