South America Geography & Climate

The defining geographic feature of South America is the Andes, the world's longest continental mountain range, running unbroken for roughly 7,000 kilometers along the entire western edge of the continent from Venezuela to Chile's southern tip. It contains some of the highest peaks outside the Himalayas, including Aconcagua in Argentina, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere.

East of the Andes lies the Amazon Basin, the largest rainforest and river system on Earth, draining roughly 40% of the continent's land area across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the Guianas. The Amazon River itself carries more water than the next several largest rivers in the world combined.

The south of the continent narrows dramatically into Patagonia, shared between Argentina and Chile — a region of steppe, fjords, and glacial ice fields, including some of the few glaciers in the world that are still advancing rather than retreating. Between these extremes sit the fertile Pampas grasslands of Argentina and Uruguay, the arid Atacama Desert in northern Chile (among the driest places on Earth), and extensive Atlantic and Pacific coastlines that shape the climate and culture of nearly every country on the continent.

South America spans nearly every climate zone that exists, a direct result of its huge range of latitude and altitude. Near the equator, the Amazon Basin is uniformly hot and humid year-round, with a wet and a slightly-less-wet season rather than a true dry one. Moving south, climates shift through subtropical (southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay), temperate (central Argentina and Chile), and finally to the cold, windswept sub-polar climate of Patagonia at the continent's southern tip.

Altitude complicates this pattern significantly in the Andes: cities like La Paz, Bolivia, and Quito, Ecuador sit above 2,800 meters and have notably cool, thin-air climates despite their tropical latitude — a very different experience from lowland cities at a similar distance from the equator. Northern Chile's Atacama Desert, meanwhile, is one of the driest places on Earth, some weather stations there having never recorded measurable rainfall.

Because the continent sits mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, its seasons run opposite to North America and Europe, which matters for trip timing — see the Best Destinations By Month section for how this plays out region by region.