South America
South America is a continent where the extremes are literal: the driest desert on Earth runs along its Pacific edge, the highest waterfall drops free-fall from a Venezuelan plateau, and a citadel built by the Inca at 2,430 metres still stands on an Andean slope above the clouds. The distances involved are humbling — you can travel from the salt flats of Bolivia to the grasslands of Patagonia and feel as though you've crossed several planets.
What holds it together is a layered history written in stone, language, and food. Pre-Columbian civilisations, Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, African diaspora, waves of European immigration — the continent carries all of it simultaneously, sometimes within a single city block.
Popular countries in South America
How South America came to be
People have lived here for at least 12,000 years, descended from migrants who crossed from Siberia during the last ice age. By 900 BC the Chavín had built trade networks across the Andes; the Moche flourished on Peru's north coast through the ninth century AD. The Inca, beginning around 1200 CE, eventually ruled an empire stretching from central Peru across the high Altiplano around Lake Titicaca — until Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1531 with fewer than 200 men and 24 horses, and the empire collapsed within four years.
European contact reshaped the continent at enormous human cost. Columbus first sighted the coast in 1498; Pedro Cabral reached the northeast in 1500 by accident, blown off course while trying to round Africa. Most indigenous peoples died from introduced disease. By the early 1800s, leaders like Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín drove the independence movements that ended Spanish colonial rule across most of the continent.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Climate varies more dramatically here than on any other landmass — tropical heat and humidity in the Amazon basin, high-altitude cold on the Andean Altiplano, Mediterranean dryness in central Chile, and sub-Antarctic wind in the far south. Research the specific region you're heading to rather than the continent as a whole; the seasons that apply in one place may be reversed just a few degrees of latitude away.
Right now
↡ Regions
↡ Countries
No places match these filters.
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.