Páramo is the world's fastest evolving and coolest biodiversity hotspot.

Average net diversification rates of páramo plant lineages are faster than those of other reportedly fast evolving hotspots and that the faster evolving lineages are more likely to be found in páramos than the other hotspots. Most of the speciation events that we observed in the páramos (144 out of 177) occurred during the pleistocene possibly due to the effects of species range contraction and expansion that may have resulted from the well-documented climatic changes during that period.