We prove that the opposite of the category of coalgebras for the Vietoris endofunctor on the category of compact Hausdorff spaces is monadic over $\mathsf {Set}$. We deliver an analogous result for the upper, lower, and convex Vietoris endofunctors acting on the category of stably compact spaces. We provide axiomatizations of the associated (infinitary) varieties. This can be seen as a version of Jónsson–Tarski duality for modal algebras beyond the zero-dimensional setting.

Let be the category of all homomorphisms (i.e. functions preserving satisfaction of atomic formulas) between models of a set of sentences T in a finitary first-order language L. Functors between two such categories are said to be canonical if they commute with the forgetful functors. The following properties are characterized syntactically and also in terms of closure of for some algebraic constructions (involving products, equalizers, factorizations and kernel pairs): There is a canonical isomorphism from to a variety (resp. quasivariety) in a finitary expansion of L which assigns to a model its (unique) expansion. This solves a problem of H. Volger.

In the case of a purely algebraic language, the properties are equivalent to:“ is canonically isomorphic to a finitary variety (resp. quasivariety)” and, for the variety case, to “the forgetful functor of is monadic (tripleable)”.