We describe a hybrid client-server technique for remote adaptive streaming and rendering of large terrains in resource-limited mobile devices. The technique has been designed to achieve an interactive rendering performance on a mobile device connected to a low-bandwidth wireless network. The rendering workload is split between the client and the server. The terrain area close to the viewer is rendered in real-time by the client using a hierarchical multiresolution scheme. The terrain located far from the viewer is portrayed as view-dependent impostors, rendered by the server on demand and, then sent to the client. The hybrid technique provides tools to dynamically balance the rendering workload according to the resources available at the client side and to the saturation of the network and server. A prototype has been built and an exhaustive set of experiments covering several platforms, wireless networks and a wide range of viewer velocities has been conducted. Results show that the approach is feasible, effective and robust.