Discover Chile

Chile runs about 4,300 kilometres down the western edge of South America and averages under 180 kilometres wide. That shape is the whole story: the country covers 39 degrees of latitude, and almost nothing about the north resembles the south.

At the top is the Atacama, the driest desert outside the poles, where some weather stations have never recorded rain. In the middle is the Central Valley, where most of the 19.5 million Chileans live and where the wine comes from. Below that the land breaks up into lakes, volcanoes, forest and finally the Patagonian fjords and ice.

The Andes run the entire eastern border. Chile holds roughly a tenth of the world's active volcanoes, and its high point, Ojos del Salado at 6,893 metres, is the highest active volcano on earth. (Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas, is just over the border in Argentina.)

Chile also governs Rapa Nui — Easter Island, 3,700 kilometres out in the Pacific and one of the most isolated inhabited places anywhere.