Maria Conceiço, the first Portuguese woman to summit Everest, will attempt the summit of K2 in Pakistan to raise funds for a nursing home in Torres Vedras.
The Portuguese woman from the United Arab Emirates, who holds 10 Guinness World Records, plans to begin her two-month expedition on Sunday, June 16.
Before that, she will visit Lisbon on Thursday, where she will be a guest speaker at a sports brand event.
K2, at 8,614 meters high, is the second highest mountain in the world after Everest (8,848 meters) and one of the most difficult and risky.
“It’s very difficult not to get injured, but I’m prepared as best as possible. I trained a lot and did a lot of physical therapy,” she told news agency Lusa.
João Garcia was one of the few Portuguese climbers to summit K2 in 2007.
The expedition, in which the Portuguese will take part, also aims to climb Broad Peak (8047 meters), located on the way to K2.
Maria Conceição was born in Angola and raised in Vila Franca de Xira, but has lived in Dubai since 2003, where she worked as a flight attendant.
In 2005, she began helping poor children in Bangladesh, which led her to undertake several physical challenges to raise funds, such as climbing Everest in 2013.
She broke several world records, completing numerous marathons, ultramarathons and triathlons, reaching the North Pole in 2011 and reaching the South Pole in 2018, which was an unprecedented achievement for a Portuguese woman at the time.
A knee injury, the Covid-19 pandemic and menopausal symptoms have delayed plans to climb K2 in 2023.
In recent years he has devoted himself to giving lectures and motivational sessions to raise donations for his charity work, during which he estimates he has helped more than 600 children and young people.
To support the K2 expedition, he launched an appeal for donations to Lar Nossa Señora da Luz in the parish of A dos Cuñados, municipality of Torres Vedras, where his mother lived for 17 years.
“My mother had a very difficult life, so I am relieved that she spent the last years of her life in care. Every time I visited her, she seemed at home, as happy as she could be,” she explained.
In parallel, he is conducting an international campaign (https://www.mariadaconceicao.com/climbingK2/landing-page.php) to sell 8611 books about his activities, one for every meter of height of K2.
This initiative was a solution to circumvent the United Arab Emirates’ restrictions on foreign donations to non-profit organizations.