South America has 12 countries, around 440 million people, and holds three world records at once: the largest rainforest, the longest mountain range on land, and the driest place on Earth. It is the fourth-largest continent at about 17.8 million square kilometres, and it is joined to North America by a narrow strip of land in Panama that is only about 50 kilometres wide at its thinnest.
Twelve Countries
Brazil is by far the biggest, taking up nearly half the continent and holding around 212 million people. It borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador — ten in total.
The smallest is Suriname, on the northern coast, with under 700,000 people. It is also the only country in the Americas where Dutch is the official language.
There is a thirteenth territory: French Guiana, which is not a country but an overseas department of France. That means part of the European Union is in South America, and the euro is the currency there. Europe's rocket launch site, the Guiana Space Centre, is there too, because launching close to the equator gives rockets a free speed boost from the Earth's spin.
The Amazon
The Amazon rainforest covers about 5.5 million square kilometres across nine countries, and roughly 60% of it is in Brazil. It is the largest rainforest on Earth by a wide margin.
It holds around 390 billion trees of some 16,000 species, and about one in ten of all known animal species on the planet. Scientists are still finding new ones — on average a new species has been described there every couple of days for the last twenty years.
The Amazon River carries more water than any other river: about 209,000 cubic metres every second, which is more than the next seven biggest rivers combined. So much fresh water pours out that the sea is noticeably less salty for over 100 kilometres offshore, and early sailors could scoop up drinkable water while still out of sight of land.
The Andes
The Andes run about 7,000 kilometres down the western edge of the continent through seven countries, which makes them the longest mountain range on land. Only the underwater Mid-Ocean Ridge is longer.
The highest peak is Aconcagua in Argentina at 6,961 metres — the tallest mountain outside Asia. Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is not as tall above sea level, but because the Earth bulges at the equator, its summit is the point on the surface furthest from the centre of the planet.
The mountains exist because the Nazca Plate under the Pacific is sliding beneath South America. That grinding is also why the continent's western edge has so many earthquakes and volcanoes. The largest earthquake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5, struck Valdivia in Chile in 1960.
The Driest Place on Earth
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest non-polar place in the world. Some weather stations there have never recorded rain at all.
It is dry because it is squeezed between two barriers. The Andes block moisture from the Amazon to the east, and a cold ocean current along the coast stops rain forming to the west. The result is a strip of land where parts of the surface have been dry for millions of years.
It looks so much like Mars that NASA tests rovers there. It is also one of the best places on Earth for telescopes, because the air is so clear and the skies so cloudless, and several of the world's biggest observatories are built on Atacama mountaintops.
Animals You Will Not Believe
The capybara is the largest rodent in the world — a guinea pig the size of a large dog, weighing up to 65 kilograms. They are excellent swimmers and are famously relaxed around other animals.
The anaconda is the heaviest snake on Earth, up to 250 kilograms. The Andean condor has one of the largest wingspans of any land bird at over three metres, and it can glide for hours without flapping.
Then there are the ones that live nowhere else: llamas and alpacas in the Andes, the pink river dolphins of the Amazon, the sloth that moves so slowly algae grows in its fur, and the poison dart frogs whose skin was once used to tip hunting darts. The Galápagos Islands, part of Ecuador, have giant tortoises that live over a hundred years and marine iguanas that dive for seaweed.
Grow Your Own Rainforest
Here is an experiment. Put a little soil and a small plant into a clear jar, water it lightly, and put the lid on. Set it somewhere with light but not direct sun.
Within a day or two you will see droplets on the inside of the glass. The plant releases water vapour, it condenses on the cold glass, and it runs back down into the soil. The jar makes its own rain.
The Amazon does exactly this on an enormous scale. Trees pull water up from the soil and release it from their leaves, and so much comes out that it forms clouds — sometimes called flying rivers. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon was released by the forest itself. Cut down enough of it and the rain stops.
The Continent Was Once Joined to Africa
Look at a map and put South America next to Africa. The bulge of Brazil fits neatly into the curve of West Africa, like two jigsaw pieces.
That is not a coincidence. Around 200 million years ago they were joined in a single supercontinent called Pangaea, and before that in one called Gondwana. They began pulling apart about 140 million years ago and are still separating by a few centimetres a year.
The evidence is more than the shape. Identical fossils of a small reptile called Mesosaurus have been found in Brazil and in southern Africa and nowhere else, and it could not have swum across an ocean. Matching rock formations line up across the Atlantic too. A German scientist called Alfred Wegener pointed all this out in 1912 and was largely laughed at for fifty years before he was proved right.
Ancient Cities in the Mountains
Machu Picchu in Peru sits at 2,430 metres in the Andes and was built by the Inca around 1450. It was abandoned about a century later and was largely unknown outside the region until an American historian was led there by local farmers in 1911.
The Inca Empire was the largest in the Americas before Europeans arrived, stretching around 4,000 kilometres. Its builders fitted stones so precisely without mortar that you cannot slide a knife blade between them, and the walls have survived hundreds of years of earthquakes.
They also had no writing system in the usual sense. Instead they used quipu — knotted cords, where the type, position and colour of each knot carried information. Scholars can read the numbers on them and are still trying to work out whether they recorded words too.
The Nazca Lines
In the Peruvian desert, someone scraped enormous drawings into the ground between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. There are hundreds of them: a hummingbird 93 metres long, a monkey, a spider, a condor, and straight lines running for kilometres.
They were made by removing the reddish surface stones to reveal pale ground underneath. Because it almost never rains there, they have survived for two thousand years.
You can only see the shapes properly from the air, which has produced a lot of wild theories. The likeliest explanation is that they were made for ceremonies, walked along in procession, and meant to be seen by gods in the sky rather than by people on the ground. New ones are still being found using drones and AI.
Waterfalls and Salt Flats
Angel Falls in Venezuela is the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world at 979 metres. It is so high that in the dry season the water turns to mist before it reaches the bottom.
Iguazú Falls, on the border between Argentina and Brazil, is not the tallest but is arguably the most spectacular: 275 separate drops spread across nearly three kilometres. When Eleanor Roosevelt saw it she is said to have exclaimed "poor Niagara".
Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the largest salt flat on Earth, over 10,000 square kilometres of blinding white crust. When a thin layer of water covers it after rain, it becomes the largest natural mirror in the world, and satellites use it to calibrate their instruments because it is so flat and so bright.
People and Languages
Spanish is the official language in nine South American countries, Portuguese in Brazil, Dutch in Suriname, and English in Guyana. French is spoken in French Guiana.
Indigenous languages are official too in several countries. Quechua and Aymara are official alongside Spanish in Peru and Bolivia, and Guaraní is official in Paraguay, where more people speak it than Spanish — the only country in the Americas where an indigenous language is spoken by the majority.
Around 87% of South Americans live in cities, which makes it one of the most urbanised continents. São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá and Lima are all among the largest cities in the world. To keep exploring, see the full list of countries in South America and read about how rainforests work.
