Chile

Chile is a country in South America.

It is very long and very thin. Tall mountains are on one side. The ocean is on the other side. The capital city is called Santiago.

Chile is a long, narrow ribbon of land on the western edge of South America. It stretches about 4,300 kilometers from its border with Peru to Cape Horn, at the tip of the continent, but on average it is only about 180 kilometers wide.

The Andes mountains run along its eastern side and the Pacific Ocean along its western side. In 2024 Chile counted about 18.5 million people, and most of them live in the mild middle of the country, around the capital, Santiago.

Chile extends approximately 4,300 km from its boundary with Peru at latitude 17°30′ S to Cape Horn at 56° S, about 640 km north of Antarctica. Its average width is only about 180 km, with a maximum of about 350 km at the latitude of Antofagasta and a minimum of about 15 km near Puerto Natales. It also exercises sovereignty over Easter Island, the Juan Fernández Archipelago and other South Pacific islets.

The 2024 census of Chile's National Statistics Institute (INE) counted 18,480,432 people. Britannica describes Chile as one of the more urbanized societies of Latin America (88.4 percent urban in 2019), with most people and the largest cities in the temperate central region. Apart from a military junta that held power from September 1973 to March 1990, the country has a long history of representative democratic government.

Santiago is the biggest city in Chile.

Snowy mountains rise behind it. Valparaíso is a port with colorful houses on steep hills. Big telescopes stand in the desert to look at the stars.

Santiago, the capital, lies in the central valley with the snowy Andes rising behind it, and it is the largest city in Chile. West of Santiago, on the Pacific coast, Valparaíso is a port city built on steep hills around a bay. Its old quarter has houses that climb the hillsides and old elevators that carry people up the slopes.

In the Atacama Desert, giant telescopes stand on mountaintops. At Cerro Paranal, 2,635 meters up, the Very Large Telescope has four big telescopes, each in its own building. In the desert are also the empty saltpeter towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura, where thousands of workers once lived.

Santiago, the capital, is the largest city and draws most of Chile's internal migrants; with the port of Valparaíso and the resort of Viña del Mar to the west, it anchors the central region, where most Chileans live. UNESCO inscribed Valparaíso's historic quarter in 2003 as an excellent example of late 19th-century urban development in Latin America, with a vernacular fabric adapted to the hillsides and early industrial infrastructure such as its many elevators.

The Humberstone and Santa Laura works (World Heritage, 2005) are the best-preserved remains of more than 200 saltpeter works in the Pampas, one of the driest deserts on Earth, where workers from Chile, Peru and Bolivia lived in company towns for over 60 years from 1880, processing the world's largest saltpeter deposit into sodium nitrate fertilizer. ESO's Paranal Observatory, home of the Very Large Telescope, stands 2,635 m up in the Atacama, and its La Silla Observatory sits on the desert's outskirts, 600 km north of Santiago, under one of the darkest night skies on Earth.

The north of Chile is a very dry desert.

It almost never rains there. The middle of Chile has warm, dry summers. The south is cold and rainy, with ice and pointy mountains.

Because Chile is so long, it has almost every kind of climate except hot, wet jungle. North of about 27° south there is practically no rain at all, and the Atacama Desert gets some of the strongest sunshine in the world. The middle of Chile has warm, dry summers and rainy winters, good for grapes and other fruit.

The Andes along Chile's border include many volcanoes, some still active. The highest peak, Ojos del Salado, is 6,893 meters tall. In the far south, deep fjords cut into the land, and the Southern Ice Cap is the largest ice mass in the Southern Hemisphere outside Antarctica.

Chile's landforms run in three parallel units: the Andes to the east, the intermediate depression in the center and the coastal ranges to the west. The USGS explains that the Nazca Plate, the ocean plate off Chile, sinks beneath the South American Plate, and that this convergence raised the Andes and feeds a chain of active volcanoes; Britannica notes that volcanic eruptions, violent earthquakes and tsunamis periodically strike the country. The northern Andes generally rise to 5,000–6,000 m, and most of the higher summits there are extinct volcanoes, such as Llullaillaco and Ojos del Salado (6,893 m); farther south, volcanoes such as Llaima and Osorno, some extinct and some still active, rise above the Lake District, whose lakes formed as ice melted from about 17,000 years ago.

The South Pacific high and the cold Peru (Humboldt) Current keep the north almost rainless; Copiapó gets less than 21 mm a year and the interior Atacama is reported to receive the highest solar radiation in the world. Rainfall rises southward, from about 330 mm in Santiago to about 1,850 mm at Puerto Montt and about 4,000 mm at San Pedro Point (48° S). Chilean Patagonia keeps U-shaped glacial troughs and some 18,000 km² of ice; the Southern Ice Cap is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere after Antarctica.

About 18 million people live in Chile.

Most people speak Spanish. Many Mapuche people live in Chile too. Many people love soccer.

Most Chileans have both European and Indigenous ancestors. Spanish is the official language, and the Mapuche, also called Araucanians, are the only large ethnic minority. Over the years, people also arrived from places such as Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the Middle East.

Central Chile's warm, dry summers are good for grapes, peaches, plums and apricots, and wheat ripens in the sunny autumn. Soccer draws huge crowds in Santiago.

Britannica describes the Chilean population as largely mestizo, a mixture of Spanish settlers and Indigenous peoples such as the Atacameños, Diaguitas, Picunches, Mapuches (Araucanians), Huilliches and Pehuenches; the Mapuche form the only significant ethnic minority. In the 19th century the government encouraged German and Swiss settlement in the Lake District, and later small numbers of eastern European Jews and Christian Syrians and Palestinians arrived.

Spanish is the official language, and Britannica links Chile's strong cultural identity to the Spanish language, the Roman Catholic religion and the country's comparative isolation from the rest of South America. Life expectancy rose from 57 years in 1960 to the late 70s by the early 21st century. Central Chile's Mediterranean climate supports grapes, peaches, plums, melons and apricots, and football draws crowds of up to 80,000 in Santiago.