BURST
Early Monday morning, on March 23, Jorge Díaz-Rullo proposed the grade of 9c/5.15d for Café Colombia, the route he’s been working on for over four years in northeastern Spain. But last week, in our interview with the Spanish climber, he wrestled with the grade, noting that he had a feeling it could be “beyond 9c,” which is currently the hardest proposed sport climbing grade in the world.
“It’s still a question I keep thinking about,” Díaz-Rullo told Climbing. “The route is very hard and pushed me to an unimaginable level of demand in every sense, nothing comparable to what I experienced on the 9b [5.15b] to 9b+ [5.15c] routes I’ve done before.”
The 27-year-old climber has completed a dozen ascents graded 9b or 9b+ previously. He has also sent 100 routes at the 9 grade (5.14+ to 5.15d). When he entered the sections and sequences of the route into the online grade calculation tool Darth Grader, the algorithm spit out 9c+/5.16a. Currently, no proposed or confirmed 5.16a route yet exists in the world.
The world’s list of 5.15d climbs just got longer
As of now, only four proposed 5.15d routes exist, none of them repeated. The first was Silence in Norway, climbed in 2017 by Czech legend Adam Ondra. While several accomplished climbers have worked Silence, none have succeeded in repeating the ascent. Then in 2022, French climber Seb Bouin clipped the chains of DNA, the world’s second 5.15d, in France. Back to Norway, Austrian climber Jakob Schubert claimed the third 5.15d with his ascent of B.I.G.in 2023.
Most recently, the United States saw its first proposed 5.15d when American Sean Bailey climbed Duality of Man near Tucson, Arizona. While he sent the route in March 2025, he waited to reveal the news until this February. The decision to sit on the ascent for nearly a year revolved around the premiere of the inaugural Mellow Film Tour, which included a film about Bailey’s historic climb.
While Díaz-Rullo has not climbed a 5.15d before, his track record in the 9s runs deep. He has also climbed a close runner-up to the handful of 5.15ds in our midst: Bibliographie in Céüse, France. When Alex Megos made the first ascent of the route in 2020, he called in 5.15d. But a year later, Italian climber Stefano Ghisolfi downgraded the route to 5.15c. Five climbers have topped Bibliographie, including, most recently, Díaz-Rullo in October 2023.
Could Café Colombia be the world’s hardest climb?
So is Café Colombia really the world’s fifth—and Spain’s first—5.15d route? Or could it be even harder?
Given the four-year battle and 240 days Díaz-Rullo spent on Café Colombia and the Darth Grader data, it could be possible that the route has entered new territory when it comes to grades. At least two other climbers have publicly suggested they’re working on 5.16 projects, including Seb Bouin and Chris Sharma.
When Climbing asked Díaz-Rullo about the grade last weekend, he said, “Based on my experience and its complexity, I have a feeling it could be beyond 9c/5.15d.”
Ultimately, what led Díaz-Rullo to land on 9c/5.15d is a lack of qualification to call his route the hardest in the world. If he had proposed 9c+/5.16a for Café Colombia, he’d be skipping the 9c grade entirely. He told Climbing that aside from his feelings that the route might be harder than 5.15d, he can’t really know what a grade at the 5.16 level feels like.
“I don’t even fully understand 9c+, so I don’t feel qualified at all to make that call,” Díaz-Rullo said. “That’s why I’ve decided to propose 9c. I think it’s the most sensible and honest option, as it’s the next step beyond what I’ve done before. Whatever the grade ends up being, we’ll have to wait for future repeats, and I’d be very excited to see that happen.”
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