Explore South America

Brazil Guide →

Carnival in Rio, the Amazon rainforest, the Iguaçu Falls and miles of sun-kissed Atlantic beaches — Brazil is a sensory explosion of colour, music and biodiversity.

Argentina Guide →

Buenos Aires' European-flavoured boulevards, Patagonia's raw wilderness, Iguazú Falls and the finest Malbec wine in the world.

Colombia Guide →

Gabriel García Márquez's homeland delivers Cartagena's colourful colonial walls, the coffee region's green hills, Bogotá's thriving arts scene and some of South America's warmest people.

Chile Guide →

From the driest desert (Atacama) to pristine Patagonia glaciers, Easter Island's moai and the wine valleys of Maipo — Chile is nature at its most spectacular.

Peru Guide →

Machu Picchu perched above the cloud forest is one of the world's iconic sights, backed by the Amazon, the floating islands of Lake Titicaca and Lima's world-class cuisine.

Ecuador

The Galápagos Islands' unique wildlife, the Amazon basin, a UNESCO-listed colonial capital in Quito and the world's highest active volcano (Chimborazo) — all in one small country.

Venezuela

Angel Falls — the world's highest waterfall — plunging from the tepuis, the Gran Sabana's extraordinary tabletop mountains and the Caribbean islands of Los Roques.

Bolivia

The Salar de Uyuni's mirror of salt, La Paz strung across a canyon at 3,600 metres, and Lake Titicaca's reed islands — Bolivia is the cheapest and highest country on the continent.

Falkland Islands Territory

A British overseas territory of windswept grassland in the South Atlantic, with more penguins than people and a 1982 war that still shapes its politics.

French Guiana Territory

An overseas department of France on the South American mainland, with the Guiana Space Centre launching Ariane rockets and rainforest covering almost all of the rest.

Guyana

English-speaking and Caribbean in culture despite its location, Guyana holds Kaieteur Falls — a single drop almost five times the height of Niagara — in largely untouched rainforest.

Paraguay

Landlocked, quiet and rarely on itineraries, Paraguay has the ruins of Jesuit missions, the vast Chaco wilderness and a bilingual culture where Guaraní is spoken as widely as Spanish.

Suriname

The smallest country in South America and the only Dutch-speaking one, with Paramaribo's wooden colonial centre and rainforest covering over ninety per cent of the land.

Uruguay

Small, stable and easygoing, with Montevideo's long riverfront promenade, Colonia del Sacramento's cobbled Portuguese quarter and beaches at Punta del Este.

Rio de Janeiro

Christ the Redeemer above Sugarloaf, Copacabana and Ipanema below, and a setting between mountain and sea that no other big city quite matches.

Buenos Aires

Belle Époque boulevards, the most bookshops per person of any city, tango in San Telmo and steak that justifies the reputation.

Cusco

The Inca capital rebuilt by the Spanish on its own foundations, at 3,400 metres, and the departure point for Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley.

Machu Picchu

A 15th-century Inca citadel on a ridge above the Urubamba, unknown to the Spanish and unseen by outsiders until 1911.

Iguazú Falls

275 separate cascades on the Argentina–Brazil border, with the Devil's Throat dropping 80 metres — walk both sides, they are completely different.

Cartagena

A walled Caribbean city of balconied colonial houses and bougainvillea, and the best-preserved Spanish fortifications in the Americas.

Galápagos Islands

Six hundred miles into the Pacific, where the wildlife never learned to fear people and Darwin worked out why the finches differed island to island.

Santiago

Chile's capital in a bowl beneath the Andes, with ski resorts an hour east, vineyards an hour south and the Pacific an hour west.

Lima

A colonial centre, clifftop suburbs above the Pacific, and a restaurant scene that made Peruvian food a global category.

La Paz

The world's highest seat of government, spread across a canyon at 3,600 metres and connected by the longest urban cable-car network anywhere.

Salar de Uyuni

Ten thousand square kilometres of salt flat that floods after rain into a mirror so perfect the horizon disappears.

Torres del Paine

Granite towers, glaciers and guanacos in Chilean Patagonia, and the W and O circuits that made Patagonian trekking a pilgrimage.

Medellín

The City of Eternal Spring, transformed in two decades, with cable cars serving hillside neighbourhoods and a genuinely inventive food scene.

Quito

One of the first two World Heritage cities ever inscribed, at 2,850 metres, with the equator a short drive north of town.

Salvador

Brazil's first capital and the heart of its Afro-Brazilian culture, with the pastel Pelourinho quarter, capoeira and candomblé.

Bariloche

An Argentine lake district town of chocolate shops and Swiss-style chalets, with skiing in winter and the Seven Lakes road in summer.

Atacama Desert

The driest non-polar desert on earth, with salt flats, geysers at dawn and skies clear enough that the world's biggest telescopes are built here.

São Paulo

Twenty-two million people, the best restaurants and galleries in Brazil, and almost no tourist sights — a city to eat and go out in, not to photograph.

Montevideo

Uruguay's capital, with an 18-kilometre rambla along the river, a covered market built for grilling meat, and a pace nothing like Buenos Aires across the water.

Amazon Rainforest

Manaus is the usual gateway, where the black Rio Negro meets the brown Solimões and runs unmixed for kilometres before becoming the Amazon.

Valparaíso

A Chilean port of painted houses on 42 hills, connected by Victorian funiculars and covered in some of the best street art anywhere.

Perito Moreno Glacier

One of the few glaciers on earth not retreating, calving blocks of ice into Lago Argentino within earshot of a viewing platform.

Built around 1450 and abandoned a century later, it was never found by the Spanish, which is why it survived intact. Inscribed as mixed for the cloud forest as well as the ruins.

The very first site inscribed anywhere, in 1978. Volcanic islands whose isolated species gave Darwin the mechanism for natural selection.

Inscribed on both sides of the border, protecting the falls and the subtropical rainforest around them, home to jaguars and over 400 bird species.

The Inca capital, whose mortarless stonework the Spanish could not demolish and so built their churches directly on top of.

Inscribed for the relationship between the city and its setting — Tijuca forest, Sugarloaf, Copacabana — rather than for any single building.

Hundreds of figures and straight lines scratched into the desert between 500 BC and AD 500, legible only from the air and preserved by near-total absence of rain.

Inscribed in 1978 alongside Kraków as one of the first twelve sites, for the least-altered historic centre in Latin America.

The first colonial capital of Brazil and a principal port of the Atlantic slave trade, with Renaissance street plan and pastel facades intact.

The Patagonian ice field, Perito Moreno and Fitz Roy, holding the largest ice cap outside Greenland and Antarctica.

Easter Island's moai — nearly 900 of them, carved between the 10th and 16th centuries on the most remote inhabited island on earth.

The most extensive military fortifications in South America, built to hold the treasure fleets against English and French raids.

Built from nothing between 1956 and 1960 to Lúcio Costa's plan with Niemeyer's buildings — the only 20th-century city inscribed for its modernist design.

The Spanish colonial capital of South America for two centuries, with the Convent of San Francisco and its catacombs beneath the church.

The largest adobe city ever built, capital of the Chimú kingdom until the Incas took it in 1470, and eroding a little more with every El Niño.

Ruined 17th and 18th-century mission settlements across Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, where Jesuits and Guaraní built a society the Spanish Crown eventually dismantled.

A Pacific port whose improvised hillside urbanism, funiculars and 19th-century infrastructure survived the opening of the Panama Canal that ruined its trade.

Over six million hectares protecting the flooded várzea forests, Amazonian manatees, black caimans and two species of river dolphin.

A Portuguese foundation of 1680 fought over with Spain for a century, leaving a cobbled quarter where the two street plans visibly collide.

Aleijadinho's twelve soapstone prophets on the terrace of a Minas Gerais church — the high point of Brazilian Baroque, carved by a sculptor who had lost the use of his hands.

The ceremonial centre of a pre-Inca state near Lake Titicaca, with the Gateway of the Sun cut from a single block of andesite.

Six farming areas in the Andean foothills where steep-slope smallholder coffee growing has shaped the terrain and the architecture for a century.

Carlos Raúl Villanueva's 1940s campus, integrating work by Léger and Calder into the buildings themselves as a deliberate synthesis of art and architecture.