South America

South America is a continent in the Western Hemisphere, south and east of North America. It is the fourth largest continent, covering about 6.9 million square miles. Most of the continent sits in the Southern Hemisphere, below the equator. About 440 million people live in its 12 countries. The biggest country by far is Brazil, which fills nearly half the continent.

Land and water

South America has some of the most extreme landscapes on Earth. The Andes Mountains run down the western side of the continent. They stretch about 4,300 miles from Venezuela to the southern tip of Chile. That makes the Andes the longest mountain range in the world, almost twice the length of the Rocky Mountains. The tallest Andean peak, Aconcagua, reaches 22,838 feet. It is the highest mountain anywhere outside of Asia.

East of the Andes lies the Amazon Basin, a huge low area drained by the Amazon River. The Amazon is the largest river in the world by the amount of water it carries. It pushes so much fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean that you can still taste the river more than 100 miles out to sea.

South America also holds the driest place on the planet. The Atacama Desert in northern Chile sits between the Andes and the Pacific. Parts of it get less than half an inch of rain in a century. The thin, dry air makes the Atacama one of the best places on Earth to look at stars, so astronomers have built some of the world's biggest telescopes there.

At the far south, the continent narrows into a cold, windy region called Patagonia. Glaciers still carve the land there, just as they did during the last ice age.

The Amazon rainforest

The Amazon rainforest covers about 2.1 million square miles. That is roughly the size of the lower 48 states of the United States minus Texas. Scientists estimate the Amazon holds around 10 percent of all the plant and animal species known on Earth. New species are still being found there almost every week.

The rainforest also helps cool the planet by pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. But people have been cutting and burning parts of it to clear land for farms and cattle. Scientists debate how much of the forest can be lost before the whole system changes for good. Some worry that parts of the Amazon are already starting to dry out.

Ancient people and empires

People have lived in South America for at least 12,000 years. Many powerful civilizations rose there long before Europeans arrived. The most famous was the Inca Empire, which ruled much of the Andes in the 1400s and early 1500s. At its peak, the Inca Empire stretched more than 2,500 miles along the mountains. The Incas built stone cities and roads without using wheels, iron tools, or written language. Their mountaintop city of Machu Picchu still stands today.

Other ancient cultures, like the Moche and the Nazca, lived along the dry Pacific coast. The Nazca carved giant drawings of animals and shapes into the desert floor. The drawings are so big they can really only be seen from the sky. Scientists still argue about why the Nazca made them.

Countries and people today

In the 1500s, Spain and Portugal invaded and colonized most of South America. That history is why people in almost every country speak Spanish, except in Brazil, where they speak Portuguese. Other languages are spoken too, including hundreds of Indigenous languages like Quechua and Guaraní.

South America has some huge, busy cities. São Paulo, Brazil, is home to more than 12 million people. Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Lima, Peru, are also among the largest cities in the Americas. At the same time, some Indigenous groups deep in the Amazon still live almost completely apart from the outside world.

The continent is also famous for its soccer teams. Brazil has won the men's World Cup five times, more than any other country. Argentina and Uruguay have each won it more than once.

A continent of extremes

South America has the tallest waterfall on Earth, Angel Falls in Venezuela, which drops 3,212 feet in a single plunge. It has the largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, which turns into a giant mirror after it rains. And it has the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, where Charles Darwin studied the finches and tortoises that helped him think up his ideas about evolution. Few places on Earth pack so many different worlds into one continent.