Interactive 3D terrain visualization plays an important role in multiple networked applications like virtual worlds visualization, multiplayer games or distributed simulators. Since the client/server architecture has obvious scalability limitations, different peer-to-peer schemes have been proposed as trade-off solutions that yield good robustness, availability and scalability for this kind of systems. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid distributed architecture that significantly improves the scalability and performance of the existing proposals. The proposed scheme redesigns the relationships between the different elements of a hybrid architecture, modifies the information shared by each client with its neighboring peers and varies the messages exchanged among them, providing a larger number of users with a fluid navigation experience over a large virtual terrain.