South America: Countries, Geography, Climate, Wildlife and Culture

South America at a Glance

Where Is South America?

South America sits almost entirely in the Southern Hemisphere and wholly in the Western Hemisphere. The Equator crosses its northern part, running through Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil, while the Tropic of Capricorn passes through Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. The continent has a rough triangle shape: wide in the north and narrowing to a point at Cape Horn in the far south.

• North: Caribbean Sea
• East: Atlantic Ocean
• West: Pacific Ocean
• South: the Drake Passage, a stormy stretch of sea that separates South America from Antarctica

In the northwest, South America joins North America where Colombia meets Panama. The narrow Isthmus of Panama forms this land bridge. The border region, called the Darién Gap, is thick jungle and swamp, and it is the only place where the Pan-American Highway, which otherwise runs from Alaska to Argentina, has no road at all.

The Four Farthest Points

• North: Punta Gallinas, Colombia
• South (mainland): Cape Froward, Chile; Cape Horn lies further south on an island
• West: Punta Pariñas, Peru
• East: Ponta do Seixas, Brazil

Countries of South America and Their Capitals

South America has 12 independent countries. Two more areas belong to European countries: French Guiana is a full part of France (so it uses the euro and is inside the European Union), and the Falkland Islands are a British overseas territory that Argentina also claims and calls the Islas Malvinas.

Countries are listed from largest to smallest by area. Population figures are mid-2024 estimates from the UN World Population Prospects 2024 and are rounded; Brazil's own statistics agency estimated 213.4 million people in July 2025.

How Did America Get Its Name?

The name comes from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who sailed along the coast of South America around 1500. He argued that these lands were not part of Asia, as Christopher Columbus believed, but a "New World". In 1507 the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller printed a world map that labelled the southern landmass "America" in his honour. Later, the name spread to the northern continent too.

Because most of the region was colonised by Spain and Portugal, whose languages come from Latin, South America is usually grouped with Mexico, Central America and parts of the Caribbean under the name Latin America.

How South America Was Formed

Long ago, South America was joined to Africa as part of a giant southern supercontinent called Gondwana. Over many millions of years the two slowly drifted apart and the South Atlantic Ocean opened between them. That is why the east coast of Brazil and the west coast of Africa look as if they could fit together like jigsaw pieces.

Along the Pacific coast, the Nazca Plate, a slab of ocean floor, is sliding underneath the South American Plate. This slow collision pushes up the Andes, builds volcanoes and causes earthquakes. The most powerful earthquake ever recorded struck near Valdivia, Chile, on 22 May 1960, measuring magnitude 9.5.

For most of its history South America was an island continent, so it developed its own unusual animals, such as sloths, armadillos and anteaters. When the Isthmus of Panama finally connected it to North America, about 3 million years ago by the most widely cited estimate, animals began crossing in both directions. Scientists call this the Great American Biotic Interchange. Jaguars and llamas' ancestors came south, while armadillos and opossums moved north.

Major Landforms of South America

The Andes Mountains

The Andes are the longest mountain range on land. They run down the whole western side of the continent through seven countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Estimates of their length range from about 7,000 km to 8,900 km depending on how the range is measured, and their average height is around 4,000 metres. Aconcagua (about 6,961 m) is the highest peak outside Asia, and Ojos del Salado on the Chile–Argentina border is the highest volcano on Earth.

Many big cities sit high in the Andes. Bogotá, Quito and La Paz are all more than 2,500 metres above sea level, and La Paz, at roughly 3,600 metres, is the highest seat of government in the world.

The Altiplano

Between the ridges of the Andes in Peru and Bolivia lies the Altiplano ("high plain"), the second-highest plateau in the world after the Tibetan Plateau. It holds Lake Titicaca and the Salar de Uyuni salt flat.

Ancient Highlands in the East

The eastern side of the continent is much older and flatter. The Guiana Highlands in the north are famous for tepuis, table-top mountains with sheer cliffs; Angel Falls pours off one of them. The Brazilian Highlands cover a huge area of eastern and central Brazil.

Great Plains and Lowlands

• The Amazon Basin: the largest river basin in the world, covering much of northern South America.
• The Llanos: tropical grasslands in Colombia and Venezuela that flood in the wet season.
• The Gran Chaco: hot, dry scrubland shared by Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.
• The Pampas: fertile grasslands in Argentina and Uruguay, famous for cattle ranching and wheat.
• The Pantanal: the world's largest tropical wetland, mostly in Brazil.

Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego

The cold, windy far south is called Patagonia, shared by Argentina and Chile. It has dry steppes, glaciers and icefields. At the very tip is Tierra del Fuego ("Land of Fire"), an island group split between the two countries.

Rivers, Waterfalls and Lakes

The Amazon River

The Amazon is about 6,400 km long and is the largest river in the world by the amount of water it carries. It pours roughly a sixth of all the river water that flows into the world's oceans. Scientists still debate whether the Amazon or Africa's Nile is longer, because it is hard to agree where each river begins. Remarkably, no bridge crosses the main Amazon River anywhere along its length.

Other Great Rivers

• Paraná: the second-longest river system in South America, flowing through Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina into the Río de la Plata.
• Orinoco: the great river of Venezuela, with a huge delta on the Atlantic coast.
• Rio Negro: the world's largest "blackwater" river, stained dark by decaying leaves. Near Manaus it joins the sandy-coloured Solimões to form the Amazon, and the dark and pale waters run side by side for several kilometres before mixing. This sight is called the Meeting of the Waters.

Record-Breaking Waterfalls

Angel Falls in Venezuela is the highest waterfall in the world, dropping about 979 metres from a tepui. Iguazú Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brazil, is a horseshoe of roughly 275 separate falls, and both countries protect it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lakes and Salt Flats

Lake Titicaca, shared by Peru and Bolivia at about 3,810 metres above sea level, is often called the highest navigable lake in the world. The Uros people live on floating islands they build from totora reeds. Nearby in Bolivia, the Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat, covering more than 10,000 km². After rain, a thin layer of water turns it into a giant mirror that reflects the sky.

Climate of South America

Because it stretches from north of the Equator almost to Antarctica, and from sea level to nearly 7,000 metres, South America has almost every type of climate.

• Tropical rainforest: hot and wet all year in the Amazon Basin and along parts of the Pacific coast of Colombia.
• Tropical savanna: a wet season and a dry season, as in the Llanos and Brazil's Cerrado.
• Desert: the Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Some weather stations there have gone years without measurable rain, and NASA tests Mars rovers in its soil because it is so similar to the Martian surface.
• Temperate: mild weather with four seasons in the Pampas, Uruguay and central Chile, which has hot, dry summers and rainy winters like the Mediterranean.
• Highland (mountain): the higher you climb in the Andes, the colder it gets. Even on the Equator, peaks such as Chimborazo in Ecuador are capped with snow and ice.
• Cold and subpolar: Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego are cool, windy and often wet.

Remember that seasons in most of South America are the opposite of those in India, Europe and North America. December and January are summer in Argentina and Chile, and July is winter.

El Niño

Every few years, the ocean off Peru and Ecuador becomes unusually warm. Fishermen named this event El Niño because it often arrived around Christmas. El Niño can bring floods to Peru and Ecuador, droughts to the Amazon, and changes to weather across the whole planet, including India's monsoon.

The Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon rainforest is the largest tropical rainforest on Earth, covering roughly 5.5 million km², an area bigger than India. About 60% of it lies in Brazil, and the rest is spread across Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

The forest is home to about one in ten known species on the planet and to hundreds of Indigenous communities, some of whom still live without contact with the outside world. Its trees also release huge amounts of water vapour, which forms "flying rivers" of moisture in the air that carry rain to farms and cities far to the south.

Threats and Latest News

Around one-fifth of the Brazilian Amazon's original forest has been cleared in recent decades, mostly for cattle pastures, soybean farms, logging and mining. The good news is that clearing has slowed. Brazil's official satellite survey, PRODES, run by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), measured 5,796 km² of deforestation between August 2024 and July 2025. That was 11% less than the year before and the third-lowest figure since records began in 1988. Brazil has committed to reaching zero deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.

The forest also faced severe droughts in 2023 and 2024. In October 2024 the Rio Negro at the port of Manaus fell to its lowest level since measurements began in 1902, stranding boats and cutting off river villages from food and medicine. In November 2025 the city of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, hosted the United Nations climate summit COP30, putting the rainforest at the centre of world talks on climate change.

Animal Life and Biodiversity

South America has more species of plants and animals than any other continent. Five of the world's "megadiverse" countries are here: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

Birds: The Bird Continent

South America has around 3,500 bird species, about one-third of all the bird species in the world, which is why it is called the "Bird Continent". Colombia has more bird species than any other country, with over 1,900 confirmed, and Peru and Brazil are close behind. Ecuador alone has more than 120 kinds of hummingbirds. Other remarkable birds include the Andean condor, with wings about 3 metres across; the harpy eagle, strong enough to catch monkeys and sloths; the hyacinth macaw, the largest parrot that can fly; the ostrich-like rhea; and the hoatzin, whose chicks have claws on their wings to climb trees.

Mammals

• Jaguar: the largest cat in the Americas, with the strongest bite for its size of any big cat.
• Capybara: the world's largest rodent, a friendly-looking relative of the guinea pig.
• Sloths: they move so slowly that algae grows in their fur.
• Amazon river dolphin (boto): a pink freshwater dolphin, the largest river dolphin in the world.
• Llama, alpaca, vicuña and guanaco: South America's camel relatives. Vicuña wool is one of the finest and most expensive in the world.
• Giant anteater and giant otter: two of the continent's most unusual large animals.

Reptiles and Amphibians

The green anaconda is the heaviest snake on Earth. Tiny, brightly coloured poison dart frogs warn predators with their colours, and Indigenous hunters in Colombia once used the poison of the golden poison frog on their blow-darts. South America also has more types of frogs than any other continent.

Freshwater Fish

The rivers of South and Central America hold more than 5,600 known freshwater fish species, and new ones are described every year. The Amazon Basin alone has about 2,700 species, more than any other river system on Earth. They include piranhas, electric eels (which can produce shocks of over 800 volts), and the giant arapaima, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world.

The Galápagos Islands

About 1,000 km off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands are home to giant tortoises, marine iguanas that swim in the sea and blue-footed boobies. The naturalist Charles Darwin visited in 1835, and the differences he noticed between animals on each island helped him develop his theory of evolution.

People and History

The First South Americans

The first people reached the Americas from Asia during the last Ice Age, crossing a land bridge where the Bering Strait is today. At Monte Verde in southern Chile, archaeologists have found a camp that people used about 14,500 years ago, showing that humans reached the far south of the continent very early.

Ancient Civilizations

Caral, in Peru's Supe Valley, is around 5,000 years old and is one of the oldest cities in the Americas, built at about the same time as the pyramids of Egypt. Later cultures included the Nazca, who drew giant animal shapes in the desert known as the Nazca Lines, and the Moche and Tiwanaku peoples.

The greatest of all was the Inca Empire, which in the 1400s and early 1500s stretched from southern Colombia to central Chile, with its capital at Cusco. The Incas built a road network of about 30,000 km across mountains and deserts, and kept records using knotted strings called quipus. Their mountain citadel of Machu Picchu, built in the mid-1400s, is now one of the most visited sites in the world.

Colonisation

In 1494 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the lands they claimed along a line in the Atlantic. That is why Brazil speaks Portuguese while most of its neighbours speak Spanish. Spanish forces led by Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire in the 1530s. Diseases brought from Europe, such as smallpox, killed a very large part of the Indigenous population, and millions of enslaved Africans were forced to work on plantations and in mines, especially in Brazil.

Independence

Between 1810 and 1825, leaders such as Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín led wars that freed most of Spanish South America. Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822 and became an empire under Emperor Pedro I. Guyana became independent from Britain in 1966, and Suriname from the Netherlands in 1975.

South America Today

About 440 million people live in South America today, and around 88% of them live in towns and cities. The biggest urban areas include São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Bogotá. People have a rich mix of Indigenous, European, African and Asian ancestry; Brazil, for example, has the largest community of Japanese descent outside Japan. Spanish is official in nine countries and Portuguese in Brazil. Indigenous languages remain strong: Quechua, the language of the Incas, is spoken by several million people in the Andes, and most Paraguayans speak Guaraní as well as Spanish.

Culture, Festivals and Food

Festivals and Celebrations

• Carnival in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil): held just before Lent, with samba schools parading in huge costumes and floats.
• Carnival of Oruro (Bolivia): famous for the Diablada devil dance, recognised by UNESCO as part of the world's cultural heritage.
• Barranquilla Carnival (Colombia): a mix of Indigenous, African and Spanish music and dance, also recognised by UNESCO.
• Inti Raymi (Peru): the Inca Festival of the Sun, re-enacted in Cusco every 24 June around the winter solstice.
• Parintins Folklore Festival (Brazil): held each June on an island in the Amazon, where two teams compete with giant puppet shows about a legendary ox.

Music and Dance

South America gave the world samba and bossa nova from Brazil, tango from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, cumbia from Colombia and the haunting panpipe music of the Andes. Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that looks like a dance, was created by enslaved Africans.

Foods That Came From South America

Many foods we eat every day were first grown in South America. The potato was domesticated in the Andes, and Peru alone grows thousands of varieties. Tomatoes, peanuts, cassava, quinoa and pineapples also come from the region, and scientists have found evidence that people in the upper Amazon of Ecuador were using cacao, the plant chocolate is made from, more than 5,000 years ago. Popular dishes today include Peruvian ceviche, Argentine asado (barbecue), Brazilian feijoada (black bean stew), Colombian and Venezuelan arepas, and empanadas found almost everywhere. Try some South American recipes.

Sport

Football is a passion across the continent. South American teams have won the FIFA World Cup 10 times: Brazil holds the record with five titles, Argentina has three and Uruguay two. Argentina reached the 2026 final in New Jersey but lost 1–0 to Spain after extra time. The Copa América, first played in 1916, is the oldest international football tournament between national teams of one continent.

Natural Resources and Economy

South America is rich in natural resources, and many countries earn most of their money by selling them to the rest of the world.

• Farming: Brazil is the world's biggest producer of coffee and soybeans and a leading exporter of beef, sugar and orange juice. Argentina and Uruguay are known for beef and wheat, and Ecuador and Colombia for bananas, coffee and flowers.
• Minerals: Chile is the world's largest producer of copper. Argentina, Bolivia and Chile form the "Lithium Triangle", which holds around half of the world's known lithium, a metal needed for phone and electric-car batteries. Brazil is a major exporter of iron ore.
• Energy: Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and Guyana has become a fast-growing oil producer since it began pumping offshore oil in 2019. Brazil and Paraguay share the Itaipu Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric power plants on Earth.

The biggest challenge for the region is to use these riches while protecting forests, rivers and the communities that depend on them. Many South American countries are part of trade groups such as Mercosur (the Southern Common Market) to trade more easily with each other.

Fun Facts About South America for Kids

• Because of the Earth's bulge at the Equator, the summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador is the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's centre, even farther than the top of Mount Everest.
• Chile is about 4,300 km long but, on average, less than 180 km wide.
• The Amazon River pushes so much fresh water into the Atlantic that the sea stays less salty far out from its mouth.
• Bolivia has two capitals: Sucre, where the courts sit, and La Paz, where the government works.
• The Salar de Uyuni is so flat that satellites use it to check their height-measuring instruments.
• Some of the world's biggest telescopes stand in Chile's Atacama Desert, because its dry, clear skies are among the best on Earth for stargazing.
• The name "Argentina" comes from the Latin word for silver, argentum.