Most Kilimanjaro facts are trivia. These are the ones that change how the walk feels.
It's 5,895 metres, and free-standing
Uhuru Peak sits at 5,895 metres, or 19,341 feet, which makes Kilimanjaro the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain in the world. Free-standing is the interesting part. It isn't in a range: it rises straight off plains that sit below 1,000 metres, so you can see the whole thing at once, and so the walk takes you through every climate band on the way up.
It's three volcanoes, not one
Kibo, Mawenzi and Shira. Shira collapsed long ago and left the broad plateau you cross on the Lemosho and Machame routes. Mawenzi is the jagged one to the east, and nobody climbs it on a normal trek. Kibo is the smooth cone with the crater and the ice, and Uhuru Peak is a point on its rim. Kibo is dormant rather than extinct. There's still sulphur and steam in the crater, and you can sometimes smell it from the top.
You walk through five climate zones
Farmland, then rainforest, then heath and moorland, then alpine desert, then the arctic summit. People describe it as walking from the equator to the Arctic in a week, and that's genuinely what it's like. The rainforest is humid and loud with birds and colobus monkeys. Two days later you're on bare rock and dust with nothing growing on it at all.
There's ice three degrees from the equator
The summit glaciers are why Kilimanjaro looks the way it does in photographs. They've been retreating for well over a century and the published science expects that to continue. Nobody serious puts a date on the end of them, so treat a website that does with suspicion. What's certain is that the ice walls near the crater rim are smaller than they were in your parents' photographs.
Uhuru means freedom
The peak was renamed Uhuru, Swahili for freedom, when Tanganyika became independent in 1961. There's a wooden signboard up there and a queue to be photographed beside it at sunrise.
The crew outnumber the climbers
A typical group walks with roughly three crew members per climber, which means most of the people on the path around you are working. They're carrying your tent, your food and your water, usually faster than you and with a lot more weight. Worth knowing before you start, because it changes how you behave at camp.
People have been climbing it since 1889
The first recorded ascent was in October 1889, by the German geographer Hans Meyer and the Austrian climber Ludwig Purtscheller, guided by a local man named Yohani Kinyala Lauwo, who was still alive within living memory and is commemorated on the mountain. Local people had of course been on its lower slopes for a very long time before that. The route Meyer took is roughly what Marangu follows now.