South America

South America is the southern part of the Americas and one of Earth's seven continents, covering about 17.8 million square kilometres. Its territory includes twelve sovereign states and several dependent territories, and its population of roughly 438 million (2025 estimate) is concentrated along the coasts and in large metropolitan areas. The continent is joined to North America by the Isthmus of Panama, which is why geographers treat it as a separate continent even though the two form a single landmass. Its boundaries are the Caribbean Sea and North America to the northwest, the Atlantic to the east, the Pacific to the west, and the Southern Ocean to the south.

South America is defined by extremes that shape the rest of the planet. The Andes form the longest continental mountain range on Earth, the Amazon basin holds the largest river system and a large share of the world's rainforest, and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is among the driest places known. These landscapes drive regional and global climate patterns, the carbon cycle and the biodiversity of the continent, which contains several biodiversity hotspots. Its economies have long depended on mineral, energy and agricultural exports, and its cultures blend Indigenous, Iberian, African and later immigrant traditions.

This entry first examines how the continent is defined and how its geology produced its major landforms, rivers and climates, followed by its biomes, natural hazards and the long human history from prehistoric settlement through colonization and independence. It then turns to population, languages and religion, political organization, the economy, infrastructure, environmental change and the history of geographic study, and closes with current research questions.

Definition and boundaries

Geographic delimitation

South America forms the southern part of the Americas and is counted among the Earth's continents. It lies entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with only a small portion of its northern tip reaching into the Northern Hemisphere. The Pacific Ocean forms its western margin, while the Atlantic Ocean lies to the east. The Caribbean Sea bounds its northern coast, and the Southern Ocean (Antarctic Ocean) marks its southern limit. North America and the Caribbean lie to the northwest. Sources give slightly different latitudinal extents, with figures ranging from about 11°N to 56°S up to 10°N to 60°S, depending on how the outer islands and maritime limits are reckoned.

The continent's land connection to North America runs through the Isthmus of Panama, a narrow land bridge that has linked the two landmasses for roughly 3.5 million years. This connection is narrow enough that the continent is still treated as a separate landmass, and the boundary between the two is conventionally placed in Panama rather than along any single natural line. At about 17.8 million square kilometres, South America is the fourth-largest continent, after Asia, Africa and North America.

Continental convention and terminology

The mainstream convention in much of the world treats South America as a continent in its own right. Some geographers instead treat North and South America as a single continent called "America", or describe South America as the southern subcontinent of the Americas. The choice is partly a matter of convention and partly reflects how the Isthmus of Panama is weighed in the definition.

The terms in use overlap but are not interchangeable. "The Americas" is the broadest, covering both continents, the Caribbean and Central America. "Latin America" is a cultural and linguistic category rather than a geographic one: it refers to the region where Romance languages, chiefly Spanish, Portuguese and French, are predominant, and it includes Mexico, Central America and much of the Caribbean alongside South America. South America is thus the southern part of Latin America, but the two are not the same, and some general references use "Latin America" loosely as a synonym for South America, which blurs the distinction.

Political units

The continent contains twelve sovereign states: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. Outside this group, French Guiana is an overseas department of France, legally part of the French state, and is therefore the usual exception in lists of the continent's territories. The Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are British territories in the South Atlantic. The Falklands are also claimed by Argentina, a dispute that affects how the archipelago is described in various reference works.

Reference works vary in their labels for these territories. Some describe French Guiana as an "internal" territory or a dependency, while others count it among the continent's three major non-sovereign territories with the Falklands and South Georgia. Easter Island, a Chilean dependency more than 3,700 km west of the Chilean coast, is normally excluded from South America because it lies in the Polynesian region of the Pacific.

Borderline inclusions

Trinidad and Tobago and the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) are the most debated cases. Both lie on or near the South American continental shelf, and the South American plate underlies most of the islands of the southern Caribbean, so a geological definition would place them with the continent. Trinidad is only about 11 km from the Venezuelan coast, and the ABC islands lie just north of Venezuela's Falcón State. Trinidad and Tobago is nonetheless an independent island state in the southeastern West Indies, and it is a member of the Caribbean Community.

The ABC islands are the main exception that depends on politics. They belong to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and Bonaire holds the status of a special municipality while Aruba and Curaçao are autonomous constituent countries. Because of this history, some sources assign them to North America with the other Caribbean islands, while others regard them as the only Caribbean islands belonging to South America. The name "ABC islands" is an informal term, and the broader "Dutch Caribbean" is a geographic rather than a formal grouping.

These differences arise because sources apply different criteria. A tectonic or continental-shelf approach favours inclusion. A political approach, based on sovereignty and constitutional status, favours the place of the islands within the Caribbean or within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A cultural approach, reflecting English, Dutch and Papiamento usage rather than Spanish and Portuguese, favours Caribbean classification. Some sources also mention remote possessions, such as Ascension Island and Bouvet Island, or the Panamanian territory around the isthmus, as marginal cases, but these are rarely included in mainstream counts.

Geological framework

Plate setting and Andean subduction

The continent lies mostly on the South American plate, and most of its tectonic activity is concentrated along the western margin. Relative to a fixed South America plate, the Nazca plate moves slightly north of eastwards at a rate varying from approximately 80 millimeters/year (mm/yr) in the south, to approximately 65 mm/yr in the north. Where oceanic lithosphere meets the continent, the denser oceanic crust sinks beneath the lighter continental crust, a process known as subduction. Hydrated ocean sediments travel down with the descending slab, and the water they carry lowers the melting point of the surrounding rock, generating magma that feeds the volcanic chain. Continuous shortening of the overriding margin thickens its crust and folds rock upward, which is the basic mechanism of mountain building along the Andes. The steady squeeze gradually compressed and thickened the continental crust, causing the Andes to rise.

The rise was not uniform in time or space. The Altiplano began to uplift about 25 million years ago, coinciding with faster convergence between the Nazca and South American plates and a shallower subduction angle, while the Puna section farther south began rising 5 to 10 million years later. Earlier, the breakup of the Farallón plate into the Nazca and Cocos plates, at roughly 28 to 26 million years ago, changed the convergence direction and increased convergence velocity, which led to major uplift culminating in the Late Miocene and Pliocene.

Subduction geometry also varies along strike. Buoyant crust such as the Nazca Ridge produces a flat slab beneath Peru, and this flat slab subduction has been associated with the uplift of Pisco Basin and the cessation of Andes volcanism and the uplift of the Fitzcarrald Arch approximately 4 Ma. In the south, the Antarctic plate is involved. The Neogene history of the southern Andes reflects the dynamics of the northward motion of the Chile Triple Point, which involves the South American, Nazca and Antarctic plates in the Austral segment. A slab window that opened between the trailing edge of the Nazca and the leading edge of the Antarctic Plate allowed hot asthenospheric material to reach the base of the crust, producing Late Miocene to Recent plateau lavas.

Ancient cratons and shields

The stable core of the continent is Precambrian. The Amazonian Craton covers a broad area of the centre, north and east of the continent, and represents one of Earth's largest cratonic regions. The Guiana Shield and Central Brazil Shield (Guaporé Shield) form, respectively, the northern and southern exhumed parts of the craton. The two are separated by the Amazon Rift, a zone of weakness within the craton. The Guiana Shield, one of the three cratons of the South American plate, has basement dating to about 1.7 billion years ago. Smaller Precambrian cratons lie farther south and east, including the São Francisco Craton. Cratons are ancient parts of the continental crust which have been more or less stable since Precambrian times; where their old rocks are widely exposed they are called shields, and where they are buried under younger cover they are called platforms.

Stability, however, is relative. Cratons such as the Guiana Shield are often considered stable regions, undergoing long-term emergence and denudation due to buoyancy, but integrating geological and geomorphological observations with apatite fission-track analysis defines a history involving repeated episodes of burial and exhumation over the last 500 Myr. Much of the wider Precambrian nucleus is covered in this way: more than half of the platform is covered by Phanerozoic units accumulated in sedimentary basins of various types.

Breakup of Gondwana and the South Atlantic

South America was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana. About 180 million years ago, the land that would eventually form South America and Africa split off from the rest of Gondwana and began to move west. The timing of the final separation is given differently across sources. One account places it about 140 million years ago, when South America and Africa split and opened up the South Atlantic Ocean between them, while another says South America began to drift slowly westward from Africa as the South Atlantic Ocean opened, beginning about 130 million years ago (Early Cretaceous) and resulting in open marine conditions by 110 million years ago. The rifting itself was complex: the South Atlantic Rift was a highly-segmented, 500 km-wide, diachronous rift system. Older Precambrian structures were reactivated during this process. South America also remained linked to Antarctica for longer; South America, Antarctica and Australia remained in contact until the final phases of the break up of Gondwana around 40 million years ago, when the opening of the Drake Passage allowed water to circulate uninterrupted around Antarctica.

Sedimentary basins and the Andean sediment record

The lowlands between the shields are filled with sedimentary basins. The Guiana Shield forms the northern part of the Amazonian Craton and is separated from its southern counterpart, the Central Brazilian Shield, by the Amazon–Solimões basin. The Amazon Basin is a low-altitude intracratonic sedimentary basin, and its crust does not differ systematically from that of the old cratonic nuclei. Its strata and those of the Paraná system in the south consist of sediment accumulated over long periods, as cratonic interiors subsided and were infilled by material eroded from surrounding highlands. Because the Andes rose along the western margin, rivers flowing eastward and southward carried much of that debris into these basins, so the basin fill serves as a long-term archive of erosion in the mountains. Reconstructing when these sediments were buried and later uplifted, using thermochronology such as the apatite fission-track method, is one way researchers link basin history to the stages of Andean growth.

Relief and major landforms

South America's relief is organized around a long western mountain system, a set of ancient eroded uplands on the eastern side, and wide lowland plains in between. The Andes dominate the west. Sources give different lengths: <!-- --> the commonly cited figure is roughly 7,000 km, while some measurements along the full chain reach about 8,900 km. The range runs north to south through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. It is not a single ridge. It is divided into northern, central and southern sections, separated by intermediate depressions, and it reaches widths of about 200 to 700 km, with its broadest part between roughly 18° and 20° S. Aconcagua, at about 6,961 m, is the highest peak, and Ojos del Salado is the highest volcano. Volcanic cones, glaciers and high plateaus alternate along its length, and the lowest sections in the north are rainforest-covered slopes and Caribbean lowlands.

The central Andes contain the Altiplano, a high endorheic basin with an average elevation of about 3,750 m. It spans parts of Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and it sits slightly below the Tibetan Plateau in height. Its climate is cold and dry, with large swings between day and night temperatures. Within it, Lake Titicaca lies on the Peru–Bolivia border at about 3,812 m. It is the largest lake in South America by both area and water volume, with a maximum depth of 281 m. It is a surviving remnant of a much larger lake system that once covered much of the basin. Other remnants are Lake Poopó and the salt flats of Uyuni and Coipasa, which formed after the ancient lakes dried out. The basin's flat floor, lakes and wetlands made it a major zone of human settlement at altitude.

The Guiana Highlands occupy the north of the continent, between the Orinoco and Amazon basins, and extend across Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, northern Brazil and southeastern Colombia. They are built on the ancient Guiana Shield, whose rocks are far older than the Andes. Their most distinctive landforms are the tepuis, flat-topped table mountains with steep cliffs. Most tepuis are capped by sandstone that resists erosion, while the surrounding rock has been worn away. Relief inversion produced them: the sandstone basins that once lay low now stand high because they erode more slowly than the crystalline rock beneath them. Tepuis typically rise between about 1,000 and 3,000 m, and the Gran Sabana of southeastern Venezuela has the highest concentration. Mount Roraima reaches about 2,772 m on the Guyana border. Auyán-tepui, with its summit area of about 667 km², hosts Angel Falls, the world's tallest waterfall, which drops nearly 979 m. The summits have isolated ecosystems, and their erosional landscapes include karst, arches and large cave systems.

The Brazilian Highlands cover a much larger region, occupying most of the eastern, southern and central parts of Brazil and roughly half of its land area. Their rocks belong to the old crystalline South American shield. Long weathering and erosion reduced the surface to broad uplands, which were later reshaped by uplift, river incision and the development of a coastal escarpment. The result is an eroded plateau rather than a young mountain chain or a volcanic field. Pico da Bandeira, the highest point, reaches 2,891 m. The highlands' surfaces define much of Brazil's drainage pattern and settlement geography.

Lowland plains lie between the Andes and the shield regions and were largely built from sediment carried eastward off the mountains. The Llanos are the savanna plains of the Orinoco basin, mainly in Venezuela and Colombia. The Gran Chaco is a semi-arid lowland of more than one million square kilometres across Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and parts of Brazil, marked by extreme temperatures, seasonal flooding and dry forests. The Pampas are fertile grasslands that extend across central and eastern Argentina, all of Uruguay and southern Brazil. Estimates of their area vary, with some sources giving over 1.2 million km² and others around 750,000 km², depending on how the boundaries are drawn. The name derives from a Quechua word meaning "plain."

South of the Pampas, the Patagonian plateau stretches from roughly the Colorado or Negro river valleys to the Strait of Magellan. It lies between the Andes and the Atlantic and averages about 300 to 1,500 m above sea level. Its steppe is windswept, sparsely vegetated and thinly populated, with cliffs along the coast. The depression of Laguna del Carbón, in southern Argentina, lies about 105 m below sea level and is the lowest point in the Western and Southern Hemispheres.

Drainage systems and rivers

The Amazon basin

The Amazon system ranks first among the world's river systems by both catchment area and discharge. Estimates of its extent depend on where the limits are drawn. Britannica describes the Amazon basin as covering about 34% of South America, while a widely used figure of roughly 6.9 million km² corresponds to about 40 percent of South America. The basin's headwaters lie in the western part of the system, where the Marañón and Apurímac rivers begin in the Peruvian Andes, and the river crosses the lowlands eastward to reach the Atlantic on the coast of northeastern Brazil. Before the Andes were raised, the drainage appears to have run westward to the Pacific; the reversal toward the Atlantic followed the uplift of the Andean chain.

The river is also the largest by discharge. Its flow of about 210,000 m³ per second exceeds the combined discharge of the world's nine next largest rivers. The Amazon system carries roughly a fifth of the total water that rivers deliver to the oceans. Sediment transport is equally large: the system moves an estimated 600 to 800 million tonnes a year, and the majority of the sediment comes from the Solimões (62%) and Madeira (35%) sub-basins, which originate in the Andes. The basin is organised into several large sub-basins, including the Negro, Xingú, Madeira and Tapajós, and many of its tributaries are themselves major rivers.

The Orinoco, the Paraná-Paraguay and the São Francisco

Taken together, the four largest drainage systems—the Amazon, Río de la Plata (Paraguay, Paraná, and Uruguay rivers), Orinoco, and São Francisco—cover about two-thirds of the continent. Each has a distinct character.

The Orinoco drains much of Venezuela and forms the northern boundary of the basin system. Near the ocean, it divides into a series of distributaries to form its delta. Its upper course is also linked to the Amazon: the Casiquiare, a navigable waterway, allows water to flow from the Orinoco to the Amazon system. Its middle course crosses the Llanos, where a seasonal flood pulse inundates extensive savannas and produces a strongly pulsed hydrological cycle.

The Paraguay, Paraná and Uruguay rivers form the second-largest system. It is estimated to cover some 1.2 million square miles (3.2 million square km). About 2,800,000 cubic feet (79,300 cubic meters) of water per second discharge from the common mouth of those rivers, an outflow second only to that of the Amazon. The upper Paraguay floods the Pantanal, one of the largest tropical wetlands, where seasonal inundation sustains fisheries and wildlife, while the lower Paraná and the Río de la Plata carry heavy sediment loads into the estuary.

The São Francisco is different in character. It rises in the highlands of Minas Gerais and flows northward and then eastward for more than 2,500 km to the Atlantic, crossing the semi-arid Caatinga. Its discharge is modest for its length, and reservoirs such as Sobradinho regulate its flow for hydropower and irrigation, making the river a critical water source in a dry region.

Groundwater reserves

Beneath parts of the continent lies the Guaraní Aquifer, one of the largest transboundary groundwater reserves. It covers approximately 1.19 million square kilometers across Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, with two-thirds in Brazil. Its stored volume is large, totaling 30,000 cubic kilometers (km³) in stored volume and 2,000 km³ in available volume, but the resource is finite and vulnerable to contamination.

Use is concentrated. One study reports that resource exploitation totalled 1.04 km³ a year, with 94% in Brazil, and some 80% of the total is used for public water-supply. Estimates of natural renewal differ markedly. One set places it at 160 and 250 km³ per year, whereas a hydrogeological analysis considers a value in the range of 45–55 km³ a year reasonable and concludes that recharge is far smaller than the stored volume, so the system is unquestionably a 'storage-dominated' groundwater system. Some water in parts of São Paulo State is very old: groundwater older than 730,000 years BP has been identified there. Municipal wells show how cities draw on it; one deep well in Marília, São Paulo State, was designed to capture 250,000 liters of water per hour directly from the Guarani Aquifer.

The Amazon lowlands also overlie thick sedimentary basins that hold smaller aquifers, such as the Alter do Chão aquifer near Santarém, which supply local communities.

Moisture recycling in the Amazon

The Amazon forest returns a large fraction of its rainfall to the atmosphere. Under the influence of adequate soil moisture levels, the rainforest canopy is very effective at evapotranspiration, leading to a much higher evaporation rate than most over-land regions. Because of this, a substantial part of the rain falling on the basin originates as water that was previously evapotranspired within it. Prior studies have found that 25–35% of Amazon precipitation comes from moisture recycled by evapotranspiration within the Basin. The share is higher in some sub-regions: in the southern and western portions of the Amazon Basin, a large percentage of the precipitation is derived from moisture that was evapotranspired from elsewhere in the region. Other analyses report higher values, with as much as 70 % of rainfall in the Amazon and southern Brazil attributed to Amazonian evapotranspiration.

The moisture is then carried by winds across the continent. The large evapotranspiration flux from the Amazon returns around 1000 mm yr⁻¹ of water to the atmosphere, where it can then precipitate out either locally or be carried downwind and precipitate remotely at distances of thousands of kilometres. This recycling creates a feedback loop: the decreases in rainfall can lead to decreased rainforest extent, which in turn further reduces rainfall. Some analyses have linked this to a possible forest tipping point, with the literature indicating this tipping point could be triggered at 25% Amazon forest loss, in conjunction with climate change impacts.

Climate and climate zones

South America spans roughly from 12°N on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela to Cape Horn at about 56°S, so its climates range from equatorial to polar. The equator crosses the northern part of the continent, passing through Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru, while the tropical belt's southern limit, the Tropic of Capricorn, cuts across the southern interior, including Brazil and Paraguay. Because most of the landmass lies between these two lines, a large share of the continent has tropical conditions, though estimates of that share depend on the dataset. A Köppen–Geiger map based on recent data assigns about 56% of the area to tropical types, 15% to arid types, 23% to temperate types and 6% to polar types, with the polar type constrained to the southern area and the highest elevations of the Andes. Popular summaries that give a higher tropical share often count the subtropical lowlands differently, so the figures should be read with their classification thresholds in mind.

Köppen zones

The Köppen system divides climates by monthly temperature and precipitation, and its tropical types are further separated by rainfall seasonality. Constantly wet equatorial climates (Af) cover the Amazon basin and the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, while the monsoon type (Am) lies on the northern and northeastern margins of the forest. A dry-winter savanna type (Aw) covers a large part of the continent, including the Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela, the Cerrado of central Brazil and parts of the Guianas' hinterland. The arid types (BW for desert and BS for steppe) appear in the Atacama, the Peruvian coast, the Gran Chaco and the Caatinga of northeastern Brazil, which is semi-arid rather than true desert. Humid subtropical climates (Cfa and Cwa) occupy southern Brazil, Uruguay and the Pampas of Argentina, where rain falls year-round and summers are warm. Mediterranean-type summers with dry periods (Csb) occur in central Chile, and oceanic highland climates (Cwb, Cfb) occur on the Andean flanks and in the Brazilian highlands. In southern Chile's fjord coast and Tierra del Fuego, cool oceanic subpolar climates (Cfc) prevail, while the highest Andean summits fall into the tundra class (ET).

Orographic effects of the Andes

The Andes shape rainfall more than any other feature. Moist easterly air from the Atlantic and Amazon basin is pushed up the eastern slopes, where it cools and condenses, producing some of the heaviest rainfall on the continent. The air that crosses the crest has lost most of its moisture and warms as it descends the western side, producing a rain shadow. In the north and centre of the range, this effect creates a strongly dry western margin; in the southern Andes, prevailing westerlies deliver heavy rain to the western flanks, leaving the eastern side of Patagonia dry. The Atacama Desert is the most extreme example. It sits between the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range, two barriers high enough to block moisture from both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, creating a two-sided rain shadow. Average rainfall in parts of the desert is near zero, and some stations have never recorded rain.

The Humboldt Current and coastal aridity

The cold ocean current along the Pacific coast reinforces the dryness of the western margin. The Humboldt Current carries cold, nutrient-rich water northward from southern Chile to northern Peru. Its chilled surface waters cool the air above them, creating a persistent temperature inversion that suppresses cloud formation and convective rain. Instead, dense, almost-permanent coastal fogs develop, and these fogs are the main water source for the sparse vegetation of the coastal lomas formations. Together with the Andean rain shadow, the current explains why the coastal strip of the Atacama receives less than a few millimetres of rain in a typical year.

El Niño–Southern Oscillation

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the main source of interannual rainfall variability across much of the continent, but its effects are regionally opposed. During El Niño, drought typically affects the Amazon and north-eastern South America, while flooding occurs on the tropical west coast and in south-eastern South America. Warm coastal anomalies off Ecuador and Peru heat the lower atmosphere and trigger intense convection, which is why the northern Peruvian and Ecuadorian coasts often see extreme flooding during strong events. The effect on the Humboldt system is equally large: warm, nutrient-poor water replaces the cold upwelling, which disrupts marine food chains and fisheries. Flood likelihood also varies by basin. One recent streamflow study reports that flood likelihood increases by over 120% during El Niño in the La Plata Basin and by over 120% during La Niña in the northern Amazon. Climate change adds a further complication, since greenhouse-warming-induced rainfall reductions can overwhelm El Niño-related rainfall increases, as already found in central Chile, leading to persistent dry conditions. These interactions are closely tied to drought and flood risk, and to the long-term trend in regional precipitation.

Biomes, vegetation and biodiversity

Amazon rainforest

The Amazon rainforest is the largest tropical forest on Earth. Its extent is commonly put at about 6 million square kilometres, more than twice the size of the next two largest rainforests, in the Congo Basin and Indonesia. Estimates of its share of the world's known species range from about 10 to 30 percent, depending on the source and the taxa counted. The spread reflects gaps in sampling more than disagreement about the region's importance. Plant collecting has been thin, with roughly ten collections per 100 square kilometres after three centuries, and no complete checklist of Amazonian trees exists. The commonly cited count of about 16,000 tree species is therefore contested. Vertebrates are better documented, with roughly 1,300 bird species and 427 mammal species. The basin's river system also holds more freshwater fish species than any other, which ties the forest's biological richness to its waterways. Forest loss is a serious pressure: at least 17 percent of the Amazon's forest cover has been lost over the last half century.

Drier biomes

Outside the humid Amazon, the continent's dry biomes form a diagonal corridor of open and seasonally dry vegetation stretching from central Brazil toward the southwest. The Cerrado, the second-largest biome in South America, is a savanna of plateaus and valleys with C4 grasses and scattered trees. Its vegetation ranges from open grassland to closed woodland, and the campo cerrado type, with tree cover of roughly 5 to 70 percent, is its core physiognomy. Originally it covered nearly 23 percent of Brazil. Its acidic, nutrient-poor soils, which contain aluminium levels toxic to most plants, have favoured a high degree of endemism, with around 4,400 endemic species recorded.

The Caatinga of northeastern Brazil is a mosaic of deciduous dry forest and shrubland, and it contains the largest area of seasonally dry tropical forest in South America. Here the limiting factor is rainfall rather than soil fertility. The region supports more than 900 animal species and 1,200 vascular plant species. Small enclaves of wetter Atlantic-type forest, known as brejos de altitude, persist where orographic rainfall supplies extra moisture.

The Gran Chaco lies across northern Argentina, western Paraguay and southeastern Bolivia. Its dry forests and woodlands make up the largest share of the region's dry forest extent, and the Dry Chaco contains most of that forest in large, unbroken fragments. Legume endemism is high: about 45 percent of Leguminosae species in the Southern Cone are endemic. The Pampas, by contrast, are temperate, treeless grasslands on deep fertile soils in Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, and they have been largely converted to cropland and pasture.

Andean altitude zonation

Vegetation in the Andes changes sharply over short vertical distances. One widely used Peruvian scheme places the end of the subtropical cloud forest near 2,300 metres, the tree line near 3,500 metres and the end of the puna grassland near 4,800 metres. Cloud forest begins in the lowlands at about 1,200 metres and becomes increasingly mossy with height, with persistent cloud cover most marked around 2,500 metres. At the highest levels, the forest becomes stunted and heavily covered in moss.

Above the tree line lies the páramo, a treeless belt dominated by tussock grasses that extends from about 3,400 metres to over 4,500 metres in the northern Andes. Páramo soils are often peaty and waterlogged, and the belt is commonly divided into sub-páramo shrubland, grass páramo and supra-páramo zones. The boundaries between these communities are not always sharp. A transect study in Ecuador's Llanganates found no clear zonation between cloud forest and páramo, with vegetation changing continuously along the gradient, and soil temperature and altitude emerged as the main controls on plant composition. Many páramo plants are rare or restricted to single mountain ranges, and the high-altitude mountain ecosystems therefore hold many endemic species.

Endemism and notable fauna

Several regions of the continent illustrate high endemism. The Galápagos archipelago, part of Ecuador and located about 1,000 kilometres off the coast, is famous for species that evolved in isolation, including giant tortoises, marine iguanas and the Darwin's finches that helped inspire evolutionary theory. The mainland fauna is equally distinctive. The jaguar ranges through the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Chaco, and the green anaconda, which can exceed four metres in length, is a characteristic animal of Amazonian waters. In the high Andes, the llama, a domesticated camelid whose wild relatives include the guanaco and vicuña, is adapted to puna grassland, and the Andean condor soars over the páramo and the high slopes.

Natural hazards and geological activity

Subduction seismicity

Most of the continent's strongest earthquakes come from the plate boundary off the western coast, where the oceanic Nazca plate dives beneath the South American plate. Geodetic work on the 2014 northern Chile event put the convergence near 72 mm per year, and slip on the shallow megathrust interface produces most of the region's largest shocks. The Valdivia earthquake of 1960, rated Mw 9.5, is the largest instrumentally recorded earthquake, and the Maule earthquake of 2010 (Mw 8.8) struck central Chile. In northern Chile, the Iquique event of 2014 (Mw 8.2) ruptured a segment that had built up roughly 137 years of unreleased strain. Along the Peruvian coast, a Mw 8.4 event in 2001 caused many deaths and extensive damage. Chile experiences at least one great earthquake of magnitude 8 or more about once a decade, and any given stretch of its coast is struck by a comparable event about once a century.

Not all seismicity comes from the megathrust. Faults inside the overriding plate are less frequent and produce smaller maximum magnitudes, generally around Mw 7.0 to 7.5, but their shallow focal depths can make them locally destructive. The 1947 Satipo earthquake in Peru, felt as far away as Lima and Iquitos, triggered widespread landsliding; debris blocked the Satipo River, which flooded the valley. Its reported death toll ranges from 233 to about 2,233, illustrating how wide the uncertainty in historical casualty figures can be.

Volcanic belts and hazards

The Andean Volcanic Belt is divided into four segments: the Northern Volcanic Zone (Colombia and Ecuador), the Central Volcanic Zone (southern Peru, northern Chile, southwestern Bolivia and northwestern Argentina), the Southern Volcanic Zone, and the Austral Volcanic Zone. The Northern zone contains 55 volcanoes in Ecuador and 19 in Colombia on the mainland. The Central zone is dominated by andesites, dacites and rhyolites, and its principal hazards include tephra fall, pyroclastic density currents, lava flows and domes, debris flows and lahars. Risk assessments of the Central zone single out Ubinas, El Misti and Huaynaputina as the volcanoes combining the highest hazard and exposure, and they note that focusing only on recent eruptions can overlook volcanoes showing unrest.

The most lethal eruption in the Andean region was that of Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia in 1985. Its lahars, generated by a relatively small eruption, destroyed the town of Armero and killed about 23,000 to 25,000 people, and the disaster is often attributed to poor communication of hazard information rather than to a lack of scientific data. Galeras, which sits directly above the city of Pasto, is among Colombia's most dangerous volcanoes, while Cotopaxi in Ecuador, which has erupted many times and produces lahars that have carved valleys around it, is estimated to put roughly 300,000 people at risk across several provinces. Many Andean volcanoes remain unmonitored, partly because of remote access and dangerous conditions.

Flood and drought cycles in the Amazon and Paraná systems

Amazon river levels follow a strong seasonal pulse, but interannual extremes are closely tied to tropical ocean temperatures. A record low was reached at Manaus on 26 October 2023, when the water level fell to 12.70 metres, the lowest in more than a century of gauge records. The drought developed in two stages: a La Niña phase in 2022–23 depleted rainfall in southwestern Amazonia, and the transition to El Niño in mid-2023 brought subsidence and heat to northern Amazonia through shifts in the Walker circulation, while warm conditions in the tropical North Atlantic amplified the deficit. Studies of the 2023–2024 event estimated that about three-quarters of tropical forest areas experienced at least six months of concurrent drought and heat, and the stranding of communities and the deaths of hundreds of river dolphins illustrated the human and ecological cost. Because the Madeira, the largest tributary by discharge, contributes a substantial share of the basin's water, drought in its catchment propagates rapidly through the lower river.

The Paraná and Paraguay rivers, which drain the La Plata basin, show a complementary pattern. Excess rainfall in southern Brazil, Paraguay and northeastern Argentina, which is favored in El Niño years, produces prolonged high water and floodplain inundation, while La Niña and subsequent dry phases produce low flows and reduced navigability. Because these rivers respond to rainfall across a very large catchment, flood and drought cycles often last several months rather than days.

Mass movements in mountain valleys

Steep relief, deeply weathered slopes and intense seasonal rainfall make the Andes prone to landslides and debris flows, which can be triggered by earthquakes, heavy storms or the saturation of soils. Glacial lake outburst floods form when moraine-dammed lakes, fed by retreating glaciers, breach suddenly, often after ice avalanches or earthquakes enter the lakes. Debris flows in narrow valleys can travel far beyond the slopes that initiated them and block rivers, creating temporary dams whose failure produces secondary floods. Exposure has grown as informal settlements expand onto steep hillsides and river terraces in cities of the Andean highlands, where construction, deforestation and inadequate drainage can increase the frequency of failures. Hazard mapping and early warning systems are therefore closely tied to land-use planning in these valleys.

Early human settlement and pre-Columbian societies

Early occupation and its dating

The chronology of the first human presence in South America is still being revised. Monte Verde, a site on Chinchihuapi Creek near Puerto Montt in southern Chile, was excavated from the 1970s. Its finds included stone tools, preserved wood, bones and skin of extinct animals, a human footprint, edible plant remains, hearths and natural rope, and radiocarbon dates placed its main occupation level at about 14,500 years ago. A 2026 study led by Todd Surovell and published in Science instead dates the site to between 4,200 and 8,200 years ago. Many experts point to errors in the methods behind that revision, so the older age has not been abandoned, and the debate over the date of initial settlement remains open. Other sites in southern Peru, such as Quebrada Jaguay, have also yielded evidence of foragers from around 12,000 years ago.

Plant remains from Monte Verde are also significant for the history of agriculture. A wild potato specimen recovered there, reported at about 13,000 years old, would be the oldest record for any potato species, wild or cultivated, and suggests that southern Chile was one of the two main centres for the evolution of the common potato.

Andean civilizations

The Caral-Supe civilization on the north-central coast of Peru is the earliest complex society in South America. It flourished between approximately 3000 and 1800 BCE and built a network of urban and semi-urban settlements across the Supe Valley and neighbouring river valleys. Its sites spread across five coastal river valleys, including the Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, Fortaleza and Chancay. The principal site, Caral, combined large platform mounds with planned residential districts, and its irrigated agriculture drew water from rivers crossing an otherwise arid desert. Some specialists date the first urban settlement in the region even earlier, to about 3500 BCE, which would place it before the Chavín culture of the Andean highlands, long regarded as the first South American civilization. The Caral sites have been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009.

Later Andean states developed in the highlands and around Lake Titicaca, including Tiwanaku and Wari, which built on earlier practices of terracing and irrigation. The Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) unified much of this region in the decades before the Spanish conquest. Its administration relied on a road network known as the Qhapaq Ñan, which linked Cusco with distant provinces, supported relay messengers, and connected storehouses that held supplies for officials and armies. Labour obligations, known as mit'a, and a recording system based on knotted cords called quipus allowed the state to organize production across steep and varied terrain.

Lowland Amazonian and Caribbean societies

Amazonian societies were far more numerous and varied than older accounts assumed. Researchers now describe the forest as a human-shaped landscape. Agricultural communities in the Amazon Basin actively shaped and managed their environment before the arrival of European colonists, and through activities that favoured useful species, indigenous peoples engaged in forest domestication, which changed the composition of plants across the rainforest. Settlement patterns were concentrated along rivers, and the effects of these activities radiated outward from human activity, with spaces near settlements, campsites and trails undergoing more intensive change than remote spaces. In the upper Purus region of southwestern Amazonia, survey work has documented regularly spaced mounded villages linked by radiating roads.

One of the most distinctive land-management practices was the creation of Amazonian dark earths. Terra preta, also known as Amazonian dark earth, is a very dark and fertile anthropogenic soil found in the Amazon Basin. Its colour comes from charcoal mixed into the soil over centuries, and its high phosphorus content and porous structure retained nutrients in otherwise poor tropical soils. Pottery fragments found within it suggest that the soils also formed from organic waste that was burned and buried.

Caribbean and coastal societies, including the ceramic-using groups that moved from the Orinoco basin into the Lesser Antilles and later the Taíno of the Greater Antilles, relied on mixed farming, fishing and gathering. Taíno farmers grew cassava in raised garden mounds called conucos, and they used cassava bread as a staple. Their settlements were often organized around plazas and chiefdoms, and their networks extended across island chains.

Domestication of crops

South America is a major centre of plant domestication. Cassava (manioc) is among the best-documented examples. Its domestication took place more than 10,000 years ago in west-central Brazil, and it became a staple food among pre-Columbian Americans. Peanuts, chilli peppers, cacao and several palms are also thought to have been domesticated in the western Amazon, where the wild relatives of many of these crops are still found today. Archaeological research in southwestern Amazonia has also documented rice husk remains indicating early cultivation in wetland settings.

In the Andes, potatoes and quinoa were domesticated around Lake Titicaca and the surrounding highlands, many thousands of years ago, and they became the basis of highland diets. Potato diversity in the Andes is among the highest of any region, and this diversity was maintained through local selection by farmers.

Maize is usually treated differently. It was domesticated in southern Mexico from teosinte and spread southward through the Americas, reaching the Andes long after its initial domestication. It is therefore not an independent South American domestication, and the examples above should be understood as separate processes within the continent.

Colonization and independence

Iberian rule over South America was set by a papal-backed division of newly reached lands. The Treaty of Tordesillas, dated 7 June 1494, placed a pole-to-pole demarcation line 370 leagues to the west of Cape Verde islands. Lands to the east went to Portugal and those to the west to Castile modifying an earlier bull by Pope Alexander VI. Because the eastern end of the line fell in the Portuguese zone, the future Brazil was secured for Portugal as its eastern end fell within the Portuguese zone. Castile received most of the rest of the continent. The Treaty of Zaragoza of 1529 defined the opposite side of the globe, but the Indigenous peoples of the Americas never accepted these agreements The other side of the world was divided a few decades later by the Treaty of Zaragoza, signed on 22 April 1529.

Spanish authority was organized through viceroyalties. The Viceroyalty of Peru, with Lima as its principal city, was the most important city of the Spanish colonies in South America for much of the colonial period. The viceroyalties of New Granada and of the Río de la Plata were created later in the eighteenth century, reflecting the growth of the Caribbean coast and the southern Atlantic trade. Portuguese Brazil developed from coastal settlements into the colony of Brazil, which became the largest Portuguese possession in the Americas.

The Guianas

The Guianas were contested by several European powers rather than governed as a single colony. The Dutch established the most durable presence. Their first recorded voyage to Guiana came in 1598, and in 1657 the Zeelanders firmly established themselves in the Pomeroon, Moruca and Demerara rivers. The Dutch West India Company received the territory by charter in 1682. Dutch claims originally covered the entire region, but losses to Portugal, Britain and France left the Netherlands with the section it actually settled, which became Dutch Guiana.

The modern boundaries follow the rivers that separated these colonies. In the early twentieth century the division ran from the Orinoco and Essequibo systems in the west to the Amazon and Oyapock rivers in the east: British Guiana extended to the Corantijn, Dutch Guiana lay between the Corantijn and the Maroni, and French Guiana lay between the Maroni and the Oyapock. French efforts were repeatedly reversed. The Dutch seized the French settlement at Cayenne in 1658, and after an English occupation the territory was returned to France under the Treaty of Breda on 31 July 1667. Britain captured the Dutch colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice in 1781, and in 1782 they were taken by France before being restored to the Netherlands in 1783. In 1814 the Netherlands ceded the three eastern colonies to Britain, and the British administration merged the three colonies into British Guiana in 1831. Slavery ended at different dates in each colony: slaves of the British were released in 1840, slaves of the French were released in 1848 and those of the Dutch were emancipated in 1863. British Guiana gained its independence in 1966, Suriname gained its independence from the Dutch Government in 1975, and French Guiana remains part of France.

Independence movements

Creole elites in Spanish America began to break from Spain after 1808, when the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula weakened royal authority. Simón Bolívar, born in Caracas, led campaigns that wrested independence from Venezuela, New Granada, and Quito in a dizzying succession of campaigns. His union of these territories, the republic of Gran Colombia, existed from 1819-1831. José de San Martín, from the Río de la Plata, crossed the Andes with an army built piece by piece, liberated Chile, and proclaimed the independence of Peru. The two leaders met at Guayaquil in 1822. Their disagreement over the form of government was significant: San Martin favoring constitutional monarchies and Bolivar supporting republics. Following this meeting, San Martín withdrew from public affairs, and Bolívar completed the campaigns in Peru. Upper Peru was the last territory to be freed, and in 1825 it was renamed "Bolivia" in his honor. By 1825 nearly every Spanish American colony had won independence, except Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Brazil separated from Portugal through a different path. In 1822 the Portuguese prince regent Pedro declared independence and became emperor, so that Brazil remained a monarchy with the Braganza dynasty and avoided the fragmentation seen in Spanish America.

Nineteenth-century wars and borders

Independence did not end conflict among the new states. The War of the Pacific (1879–1884) pitted Chile against Peru and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert. Chile gained the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta, and Bolivia lost its Pacific coastline and became landlocked. The Paraguayan War (1864–1870) saw Paraguay face the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay suffered a devastating loss of population and territory, and its frontiers with Argentina and Brazil were redrawn in the aftermath. Bolivia also lost the Acre region to Brazil in 1903 through the Treaty of Petrópolis, and Bolivia and Paraguay fought the Chaco War of 1932–1935 over the Gran Chaco lowlands. These conflicts, rather than colonial lines alone, determined many of the modern borders of the continent.

Population, settlement and urbanization

South America's population was estimated at roughly 438 million in 2025 and the continent comprises 14 countries and territories with widely differing population densities. Some compilations put the total slightly higher, at about 439 million (UN World Population Prospects 2024 Revision). Growth is slow: the rate of approximately 0.56% in 2025 is the second lowest of any continent globally, just above Europe, and the UN projects that the population will peak around 2049. Brazil is the demographic anchor. It has about 212.8 million inhabitants, close to half of the continent's total, and it is the only country above 100 million. Colombia is next, at roughly 53 million, followed by Argentina (about 46 million), Peru (about 35 million) and Venezuela (about 28.5 million). The top five countries account for about 85.6% of the continental total, leaving the remaining eight nations to share the rest.

Population is very unevenly spread. Density is highest in the Andean and coastal belts: Ecuador stands at about 74 people per square kilometre, while Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana have densities of roughly 4 per square kilometre. The large interior of the Amazon basin, the Guiana Highlands, the Gran Chaco and Patagonia remain thinly settled. Most people live within a few hundred kilometres of the Pacific or Atlantic coasts, or in the uplands of the Andes, while the Amazon forest holds a small fraction of the continent's residents despite covering a large part of its land.

Several metropolitan areas dominate the urban system. São Paulo is the largest, with nearly 23 million residents in recent estimates, and its population exceeds that of several well-known megacities elsewhere in the world. Buenos Aires follows with more than 15 million people by one widely used count, then Rio de Janeiro (about 13.9 million), Bogotá (about 11.8 million) and Lima (about 11.5 million). Definitions differ: other metropolitan series give lower figures, such as about 12.9 million for Rio and about 11.3 million for Lima, so ranking within the top five depends on the boundary used. Economically the picture is similar. In a 2023 PPP comparison, Greater São Paulo led Latin American cities by GDP at about $531 billion, ahead of Greater Buenos Aires at $357 billion, Greater Rio de Janeiro at $286 billion, and the Bogotá and Lima metropolitan areas at about $253 billion and $210 billion. Brazil also dominates the urban hierarchy: it accounts for more than half of the continent's 50 most populated cities.

Urbanization has been rapid. In Latin America, the settlement pattern shifted from rural to predominantly urban in less than 50 years. The urban share of the population rose from about 40% in 1950 to over 80% by 2020. The early phase was driven by import-substitution industrialization, which generated significant labour opportunities in the cities after the 1930s crisis, while farm modernization and high rural population growth pushed people out of the countryside. Migration has since shifted, and urban-urban migration flows now predominate over rural-urban ones.

Rapid growth outpaced housing and services. Migrants often built homes on the urban periphery without land titles or infrastructure, and land "invasions" in which large numbers of families occupied plots overnight became a common route to settlement. In 2014, 24.4% of the urban population in Latin America and the Caribbean lived in informal settlements. In Bogotá, one-quarter of the urbanized area is informal. Many of these settlements occupy steep hillsides and flood-prone riverbanks, which exposes residents to landslides and floods. Inequality is central to these patterns: the Gini index for Latin America stood at 0.5 in 2017, and the region remains the most unequal in the world. Historical data from São Paulo illustrate the health dimension, with residents of the richest neighbourhoods in 1970 having 12.3 more years of life expectancy than those living in favelas. Public transport carries much of the daily load, with an estimated 200 million people using public transportation systems in the region each day.

Peoples, languages and religion

Languages

Spanish is the most widely spoken European language on the continent and is official or national in most of its states, which is why it is the common language of Latin America outside Brazil. Portuguese is the language of Brazil, which holds most of the continent's population, so the two languages have close speaker totals. Estimates differ by source and method, and one widely cited comparison puts Spanish at about 210 million speakers and Portuguese at about 206 million, while another notes that Portuguese is the most spoken language within South America as a continent. The non-Hispanic languages follow the colonial map: Dutch in Suriname, English in Guyana and French in French Guiana. Guyana and Suriname, together with French Guiana, are therefore the continent's main islands of non-Iberian official language, a pattern shaped by the Dutch, British and French colonies discussed elsewhere in this entry.

Indigenous languages remain numerous and in some places official. Quechua is the largest group, with estimates of its speakers ranging from about 8 to 13 million depending on how dialects are classified. Guaraní has roughly 6.5 million speakers and Aymara roughly 2.5 million. Bolivia recognises Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní as co-official with Spanish, Paraguay gives Guaraní joint status with Spanish, and Peru gives Quechua and Aymara official standing where they predominate. Colombia has constitutionally recognised more than 60 Indigenous languages within the territories of its ethnic groups, and Brazil has around 135 confirmed Indigenous languages, most spoken in the north and centre-west. Paraguay is an unusual case in the Western Hemisphere, where a majority of people habitually speak an Indigenous language alongside the colonial one rather than shifting entirely to Spanish. Many languages that were spoken before European arrival are now extinct, such as those once spoken in the Marañón basin. Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní and Tupí spread widely during the colonial period, because missionaries and colonial administrators used them as lingua francas. Brazilian Portuguese also carries Tupí-Guaraní and African influences in its vocabulary and sound system.

Ethnic composition

The population of South America descends from Indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans and their mixed descendants, together with smaller groups of Asian and Middle Eastern origin. Indigenous peoples number roughly 18 million, with the largest populations in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Brazil. Across Latin America as a whole, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples together make up about 30 per cent of the population, although national proportions differ considerably. Argentina is predominantly of European descent, Bolivia and Peru have large Indigenous majorities or pluralities, and Brazil has a very large population of African descent.

The categories in use today are largely inherited from the colonial caste system. Colonial authorities distinguished people of exclusively Spanish descent born in the colonies (criollos) from people of mixed European and Indigenous descent (mestizos), mixed European and African descent (mulatos), and mixed Indigenous and African descent (zambos). Portuguese-speaking areas used parallel terms such as mestiço, mameluco and cafuzo. The terms persist in censuses and everyday speech, although their meaning and social weight vary by country. Genetic studies of South American populations support the picture of extensive mixing: most European ancestry in the region traces back to the Iberian Peninsula, with a notable Italian component in Argentina, and the share of Native American ancestry varies with the local Indigenous populations, so that Peruvians show closer affinities with Andean groups and Colombians with lowland and coastal groups. Census research across the region also shows that ethnoracial categories are linked to unequal social and economic outcomes, with Indigenous and Black populations often concentrated in the lower socioeconomic strata.

Religion

Catholicism was the foundation of religious life during Iberian rule and for much of the twentieth century. According to the Pew Research Center, the vast majority of Latin Americans were Catholic in 1900, and the share has fallen markedly since. A 2024 survey of more than 6,200 adults in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru found Catholics still form the largest religious group in each country, at between 46 and 67 per cent of adults. The Catholic share fell by at least nine percentage points in all six countries over the past decade, while the unaffiliated population, including atheists, agnostics and people with no particular faith, rose by seven points or more and now accounts for 12 to 33 per cent of adults. In several countries the unaffiliated now outnumber Protestants, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Much of the shift comes from religious switching, in which people raised as Catholics leave the faith, with many becoming unaffiliated and smaller numbers joining Protestant churches.

Protestantism has grown more slowly and has been comparatively stable in recent decades. Brazil has the largest Protestant share among the six countries, at 29 per cent of adults. Pentecostalism is widespread across the region, although its share among Protestants has declined as other traditions have grown. Despite these changes, most Latin Americans still describe themselves as believers in God, and the region remains more religious on average than much of Europe.

Religious life also includes traditions that predate or run alongside Christianity. In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda developed from African-derived traditions in dialogue with Catholic and Indigenous practices, and they remain part of the country's religious landscape. Indigenous spiritual traditions persist among many Andean, Amazonian and Chaco communities, often in forms that combine older beliefs with Christian ceremonies.

Cultural expression

Several musical and dance forms that circulate across the continent originated in specific urban and regional contexts. Tango emerged in the late nineteenth century in the Río de la Plata region around Buenos Aires and Montevideo, shaped by the meeting of European immigrants, Afro-Argentine musical traditions and the working-class culture of the port cities. Samba developed among Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro and became central to Brazilian carnival. Cumbia originated on the Caribbean coast of Colombia and spread through much of the continent, taking local forms in the Andes and in Argentina. These genres are represented in national and regional identities and are commonly studied as examples of hybrid cultural creation.

Literature in the twentieth century achieved wide international recognition through the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, a movement associated with novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, alongside Carlos Fuentes of Mexico. Their experimental narrative techniques and their treatment of history, political power and regional identity made the Latin American novel a global reference point, and their work continues to shape how the continent is read abroad.

Political systems and regional organizations

Constitutional forms

The twelve sovereign states differ considerably in how they distribute power. Brazil and Argentina are federal republics, in which authority is divided between a national government and constituent states or provinces, and both have presidential executives. Venezuela is also a federal state. Colombia, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay are unitary republics with presidential systems, although Colombia has elected regional governments and a decentralized administration. Bolivia and Ecuador are the continent's main examples of constitutional plurinationalism: their post-2000 constitutions, adopted in 2009 and 2008, define the state as plurinational and give Indigenous nationalities and their legal systems formal recognition alongside the national legal order. Guyana and Suriname are unitary republics with presidential executives, but Suriname's president is chosen by the National Assembly rather than by direct popular vote, which gives its arrangement a parliamentary character.

Most states rewrote their constitutions in the late twentieth century. Several of these texts, including Brazil's in 1988, were drafted to limit the role of the armed forces and to guarantee civil and political rights.

The return to civilian rule

Much of the continent was ruled by military governments in the second half of the twentieth century, and the transition to elected civilian rule was uneven in both timing and character. The 1964 Brazilian coup, with U.S. support, sparked authoritarian rule across the continent. In Brazil, the process was gradual: beginning in 1974, the Brazilian military government under President General Ernesto Geisel initiated the gradual process of redemocratization. The first free elections in 20 years were held for the national legislature in 1982. Presidential succession in 1985 was indirect, and the president-elect, Tancredo Neves, never took office; his vice, José Sarney, succeeded him instead. In 1988, a new Constitution passed and Brazil officially returned to democracy.

In Argentina, the military seized power in 1976. The regime collapsed after the defeat in the war against the United Kingdom for the Malvinas Islands, and democratic government was restored in 1983. Uruguay's military closed parliament in 1973, and elections were held that resulted in the selection of a longtime Colorado politician, Julio María Sanguinetti, as president, to take office on March 1, 1985. Chile's Pinochet regime gave way after suffering defeat in a national referendum, while Paraguay's long dictatorship under Alfredo Stroessner ended in 1989.

The transitions often left military institutions with considerable influence. In Brazil and Chile, the Armed Forces enjoyed a strong political position, and were able to negotiate transition to civilian rule, in which the military remained with several privileges. Accountability also varied: with the exception of Argentina, no country convened a Truth Commission to formally hold responsible those individuals who committed or authorized atrocities. The regional dimension was equally important, since the repression was coordinated across borders through a cooperation agreement among Southern Cone security services known as Operation Condor.

Regional organizations

Mercosur was created in 1991 when Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay signed the Treaty of Asuncion, a bloc that grew out of an effort to cement a rapprochement between Argentina and Brazil. In 1994, the group signed the Protocol of Ouro Preto, formalizing its status as a customs union. Venezuela was suspended from Mercosur in 2016 for failing to comply with democratic principles and for its deteriorating human rights record. Bolivia, which became a full member in July 2024, joined the four founding members. Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname are associate members. Despite its ambitions, the bloc has faced problems: it has run into decreasing intra-bloc trade as well as political disagreements that have stunted progress and trade liberalization.

CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, is a different kind of organization. It was established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas, signed by Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago on August 1, 1973. Its aims include economic integration; foreign policy coordination; human and social development; and security. Its membership is centred on the English-speaking Caribbean, so South American participation is limited to Guyana and Suriname. Suriname became the 14th Member State of the Caribbean Community on July 4, 1995.

The Guianas and Caribbean links

The three Guianas, lying next to each other on the north-eastern coast of South America, sit within different institutional networks. Guyana and Suriname are CARICOM members and also participate in Mercosur as associates, while French Guiana, as an overseas department of France, belongs to the European Union rather than to either body. Guyana and Suriname's shared English and Dutch colonial heritage also shaped their separate integration paths. Their maritime boundary dispute was settled in September 2007 under an arbitration by the United Nations, which removed one of the few remaining obstacles to closer cooperation between the two states. Venezuela, whose Caribbean coast gives it a maritime orientation, appears among CARICOM's observer states, which engage in at least one of the organization's technical committees.

Economy and resource base

Brazil is the economic centre of the continent. It is the only South American economy among the world's ten largest, and its 2025 output was about 2.28 trillion dollars, roughly half of the regional total. Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Peru follow in that order, with Ecuador and Venezuela further down the list. Per-person figures reorder the ranking. On a purchasing-power basis, output per head is highest in Guyana, largely driven by its oil reserves, and Uruguay and Chile come next. Brazil's size, not its income per person, is what gives it weight in the continental economy. Argentina and Colombia are the other large economies, while Bolivia, Paraguay and Suriname are much smaller. Regional trade is organized mainly around two major trade blocks: Mercosur and the Andean Community. The region's modern economic structure also reflects the mid-twentieth-century shift toward domestic manufacturing, when from the 1930s to the 1980s, countries in South America used import substitution, a policy that protected local production against foreign goods.

Mineral wealth is concentrated in the Andes. The lithium triangle of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile sits on salt flats that hold a little over half of the world's known lithium, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, which is why the area has become central to battery supply chains. Production is highly uneven. Chile produced nearly 49,000 tonnes in 2024, Argentina about 18,000 tonnes, and Bolivia just a few hundred tonnes. Bolivia's large reserves remain largely undeveloped, partly because of technical limits and state control, while Chile has built the most commercial capacity. Copper is the other major Andean export. Chile is the leading producer, and Peru is also a significant source. Brazil's economy rests heavily on iron ore, and the Brazilian and Venezuelan oil sectors remain major sources of export revenue, although Venezuela's output has been constrained for years by economic and political problems. Oil and gas continue to sit alongside renewable-energy investment in the energy mix, a tension discussed in the infrastructure section.

Agriculture is another pillar of exports. In 2024 the region supplied approximately 75% of China's total soybean imports, and the farms of the Pampas and the expanding frontier of central Brazil supply much of that trade. Beef and coffee are also important. China announced it is set to impose a new tariff on beef imports that exceed specific quotas from suppliers such as Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Such measures show how exposed the sector is to decisions in distant markets. The environmental consequences of expanding farmland are examined in the environmental change section.

China has become the continent's most important economic partner. In South America, China has overtaken the US to become the region's top trading partner. Bilateral trade between China and Latin America reached a record $518 billion in 2024. Chinese buyers take mainly raw materials, while Chinese exporters send back manufactured goods. Latin American exports to China include soybeans and other vegetables, animal products, copper, petroleum, oil, and other raw materials, whereas the region mostly imports higher-value-added manufactured products, a trade some experts say has undercut local industries with cheaper Chinese goods. As of 2024, Beijing has signed free trade agreements with Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru.

Persistent inequality and poverty limit the benefits of this growth. Income and land ownership remain highly concentrated in many countries, and public services are unevenly distributed between cities and rural areas. A large share of employment falls within the informal economy, where workers often lack contracts, social security and stable incomes. Dependence on commodity exports also makes national budgets and currencies sensitive to price cycles, so that a boom in demand from China can be followed by sharp slowdowns when prices fall. Diversifying into manufacturing, services and higher-value processing has been a recurring policy goal, but progress has varied considerably from country to country.

Infrastructure, energy and transport

Hydroelectric generation

Across Latin America as a whole, hydropower is the main source of electricity generation, accounting for 45% of the total electricity supply from the region. The Itaipu complex on the Paraná River shows how a single project can be tied into two national grids. Its operating company, Itaipú Binacional, was created under a 1973 treaty and is split evenly between Brazil and Paraguay, and each country owns half of the electricity the plant produces. Twenty turbine sets of 700 MW each bring the installed total to 14,000 MW .

Because Paraguay draws far less power than its half-share, the surplus has to be sold. Paraguay only consumes 15% of its share, so it is obliged to sell the rest to Brazil. The imbalance is stark in the output figures: in 2018, the energy generated was used to supply nearly 90% of the electricity consumed in Paraguay and about 15% of that consumed in Brazil. By 2025, the plant's share had shifted, with about 87% of Paraguay's electricity and about 7% of Brazil's, according to the operator. Power leaves the dam through two 600 kV HVDC lines, each approximately 800 kilometres long, which carry most of the energy to Southeastern Brazil. The original 50-year contract ran from 1973 to 2023 ., and its pricing terms have remained a point of friction in Paraguay.

Renewable energy and the fossil-fuel legacy

The shift toward wind and solar has been uneven. Brazil's diversification was prompted in part by the 2001 drought: following a drought in 2001 the country has been moving to diversify its renewable mix to incorporate more wind and solar. In August 2025, wind and solar produced more than a third of Brazil's electricity for the first month on record, with a share of 34%. Expansion of the grid and of energy storage is now the pressing need, since its primary task now is to strengthen transmission grids and expand energy storage capacity to fully leverage its installed clean energy potential.

Chile's generation is concentrated in the north. The northern regions, particularly the Atacama Desert and Antofagasta, host the majority of Chile's solar generation capacity. Transmission has lagged behind this build-out: the infrastructure needed to carry that electricity to where it is needed has not always kept pace. Fossil fuels remain significant. In August 2020, coal at 20.3%, natural gas at 18.9% and petroleum-based capacity at 11.3% of installed capacity together accounted for about half of the National Electric System's capacity, while wind and solar made up roughly a fifth.

Uruguay is the regional outlier. In 2024, Uruguay generated 99 percent of its electricity from renewable sources using hydropower (42 percent), wind (28 percent), and biomass (26 percent). Another estimate puts the 2025 renewable share at 98% of its electricity needs, so figures vary by source. Wind's rise was rapid: in just five years from 2013 to 2018, Uruguay increased wind power from 1% to 32% of its electricity mix, and Uruguay now exports excess power to Argentina and Brazil, rather than having to import fossil fuels like it used to.

Transport networks

The Andean highways and the Pan-American Highway form the main overland corridors. The Pan-American route follows the Pacific side of the Andes through several countries, while cross-continental routes such as the Interoceanic Highway link the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon with Pacific ports. Road density is low across much of the lowlands, and the river remains the principal artery there. For most of its course, the river flows through the Amazon Rainforest, where there are very few roads and cities.

Ocean-going traffic reaches far inland. The Amazon is navigable to large ships from the sea to Manaus, a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometres. The Port of Manaus is an important commercial center for ocean-going vessels traveling the Amazon, being the main transport hub for the entire upper Amazon basin. Upstream, the port's cargo volume reached 10.6 million tonnes (2018). Further west, ships of 3,000 tons can reach Iquitos, Peru, 3,700 km from the river's mouth, which makes Iquitos a key river port despite having no road link to the rest of Peru.

Electrification and connectivity gaps

Urban and rural infrastructure remains unequal. Major cities such as São Paulo, Santiago and Lima are well integrated into grids and fibre networks, whereas many settlements in the Amazon depend on diesel generators, small isolated mini-grids or river transport for fuel and equipment. In the Andean highlands, dispersed rural communities and steep terrain raise the cost of extending lines and telecommunication links, so service often arrives later and less reliably than in the coastal cities. Brazil's rural electrification programmes illustrate the scale of the task, as do the outages and distribution losses that affect many systems. These gaps are closely tied to inequality and to the infrastructure needs that accompany rapid urbanization.

Environmental change and conservation

Clearing in the Brazilian Amazon and in the neighbouring Cerrado savanna is closely tied to agricultural expansion, road building and fire. In 2024, fire was responsible for an estimated 60% of primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. In 2024, fire accounted for an estimated 60% of primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. Satellite monitoring has recently shown a sharp fall in clearing. According to Brazil's National Space Agency (INPE), 1,295 square kilometers of Amazon rainforest were cleared in the first half of 2026, down from 2,090 square kilometers in the same period last year. That is a 38% drop, and the lowest level recorded in a decade. The annual PRODES figure for the year ending July 2025 also fell, to 5,796 km², an 11.08% drop on the prior period and the lowest figure since 2014. Cerrado clearing has moved in the same direction, dropping to 3,142 km², the lowest since 2021.

These gains are contested and reversible. Researchers stress that a drop in deforestation does not mean that the Amazon is protected, and threats, including illegal gold mining and forest fires, are still concerns. Fire activity has moved in the opposite direction: for the entire Amazon biome, despite the slowdown in deforestation, the number of wildfires increased by a third in the first months of 2026.

Mining and mercury

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is one of the most damaging pressures in the Amazon basin. In the Peruvian Amazon, it is the leading cause of deforestation and one of the largest sources of global mercury pollution to the atmosphere. Globally, ASGM is the largest global source of atmospheric mercury (Hg) emissions and freshwater Hg releases. Mercury released from mines is deposited in forests: a study near mining sites found that an intact forest canopy near artisanal gold mining intercepts large amounts of particulate and gaseous mercury, at a rate proportional with total leaf area. Human exposure is documented as well. A 2020 study of the Munduruku people in Pará found that six out of 10 research participants had levels above the index considered safe by the World Health Organization (WHO). Mining has also expanded into protected areas; in the Peruvian Amazon, the extent of ASGM has increased over 40% in protected areas since 2012 and even more in unprotected areas. Enforcement operations in Indigenous lands have included the destruction of hundreds of camps, excavators and bunkers that serve to hide equipment and weapons linked to local crime syndicates.

Andean glacier retreat and water supply

Tropical Andean glaciers have been shrinking faster since the 1970s. Glaciers in the tropical Andes have been retreating at increasing rate since the 1970s, scientists write in the most comprehensive review to date of Andean glacier observations. The researchers blame the melting on rising temperatures as the region has warmed about 0.7°C over the past 50 years (1950-1994). In Bolivia, according to official data, the loss of glacier cover has been between 37% and 42% over the last 30 years.

La Paz is the clearest case of dependence. Glaciers in its catchments contributed ∼15% of water resources at an annual scale (14% in the wet season, 27% in the dry season). Those shares matter most in drought. During the 2016 drought, some neighborhoods of La Paz and its twin city El Alto received water for only three hours every three days; others received none at all. Lima faces a similar exposure: Ecuador's capital Quito, with 1.5 million people, and the Peruvian capital Lima, with 8 million people, also rely on melting glaciers for water and energy supplies. Glacier decline also affects hydropower, which in the tropical Andes accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Water losses in the city network compound the problem; an audit cited for La Paz found that 45 percent of La Paz's water is lost through leaks.

The Amazon as a carbon store and its resilience

The Amazon holds very large stocks of carbon in its living biomass and soils, and its forests also return moisture to the atmosphere that sustains rainfall elsewhere in the continent. Whether the system can keep doing so under continued deforestation and warming is an open scientific question. Some modelling studies suggest that once a critical share of the forest is lost, the rainfall cycle could weaken enough to convert parts of the forest to a drier, savanna-like state, with commonly cited thresholds in the range of roughly a fifth to a quarter of the original forest. Other researchers argue that these thresholds are highly uncertain and depend on how drought, fire and land use interact. The near-term risk is shaped by climate patterns: forecasts of a strong El Niño for late 2026 have raised concern about drought in parts of the forest, and the climate phenomenon, intensified by climate change, is expected to cause drought in parts of the Amazon rainforest.

Conservation measures

Conservation in the region combines protected areas, Indigenous territories, enforcement and international commitments. Brazil's approach includes enforcement and municipal cooperation: authorities are deploying resources from the Amazon Fund to support enforcement and prevention, and the environment minister has credited strengthened enforcement and municipal cooperation for the decline in clearing. Indigenous lands are central to the strategy, since stronger enforcement, satellite monitoring, and years of pressure from Indigenous movements and forest defenders are credited with reducing loss. Brazil's government estimates that avoided emissions since 2022 are estimated at 733.9 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, although this is a government estimate rather than an independent measurement. Internationally, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement set the broader targets within which national measures in the region are placed, and the 2025 UN climate conference was held in Belém, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon.

Exploration, mapping and the history of geographic study

European knowledge of the continent began with coastal landfalls and then moved inland along its rivers. The most celebrated early journey was that of Francisco de Orellana. He had joined an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro in search of the "Land of Cinnamon," and when his group persuaded him of the impossibility of returning to Pizarro, he turned to the river system itself. Drifting with the current, he reached the mouth of the river in August 1542. The journey was as much an accident of supply shortages as a planned survey, but it produced the first European account of the whole river. Along the way the party fought a skirmish with women warriors, and Carvajal's account of these warriors and of a nearby kingdom where women ruled prompted European cartographers to name the river the Amazon. The Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, a survivor, wrote the principal narrative, which recorded the sizes, customs and warfare of the Indigenous peoples along the banks. This work remained obscure for a long period, being published only in 1894, so its influence on contemporary mapmakers was limited. Like other Spanish and Portuguese chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such texts mixed observation, hearsay and myth, and cartographers had to sort these reports into the outlines of a continent that Europeans knew only in fragments.

Scientific exploration took a different form in the late eighteenth century. Alexander von Humboldt and the botanist Aimé Bonpland landed at the Venezuelan port of Cumaná in July 1799 and spent about five years in the Spanish colonies. They covered more than 6,000 miles (9,650 km) on foot, on horseback, and in canoes across present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Cuba and Mexico. Under a Spanish warrant, they explored the Orinoco in Venezuela, surveyed and gathered plant and animal specimens, and studied the geology and mineralogy of the regions they crossed. Their most important geographic result was the demonstration that the Casiquiare channel links the Orinoco and Amazon drainage systems, which they traversed in 1800 and which confirmed a connection that Spanish missionaries had reported in the sixteenth century. The expedition also attempted to climb Chimborazo in the Ecuadorian Andes, and it gathered more than sixty thousand plant specimens. Humboldt's method combined triangulation-based mapping, barometric and magnetic measurements, and botanical and ethnographic notes, and the results were published in a multi-volume work that shaped the later study of climate and vegetation zones. Later, the naturalist observations of plant and animal life, atmospheric phenomena, and indigenous cultures became the basis for the modern fields of biogeography and ecology.

The British survey voyage of HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, carried Charles Darwin along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America. Darwin collected fossils and rocks in Patagonia, examined the geology of the Andes, and documented coastal uplift in Chile after the 1835 earthquake near Concepción. Its hydrographic and geological charts supplemented the accounts of earlier explorers, and the findings helped Darwin formulate his ideas about the formation of landscapes over long periods.

Independence in the early nineteenth century left the new states with boundaries inherited from colonial administration, many of which were vague or contested. National mapping agencies, census offices and geological surveys were therefore created mainly from the later nineteenth century onward, to delimit frontiers, count populations and locate mineral and water resources. Brazil conducted its first national census in 1872 and Argentina in 1869. Twentieth-century state institutes produced topographic sheets, geological maps and resource inventories, and many boundary disputes were resolved through arbitration or treaties rather than fieldwork alone.

Modern scientific infrastructure is concentrated in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, where the dry, high-altitude conditions favour astronomy. In 1962, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) chose the edge of the Atacama Desert as the location for new astronomical observatories. The US-based Carnegie Institution for Science constructed Las Campanas Observatory in 1969; ESO built Paranal Observatory in 1988, which became the site of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an interferometer of 66 12-meter and 7-meter diameter radio telescopes, is placed on the Chajnantor plateau at 5,000 meters altitude, and its first images were released in 2011. Research institutions in Brazil and Argentina complement this work. Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the Observatório Nacional in Rio de Janeiro support space science and geophysics, while Argentina's national research council (CONICET) and the Córdoba Observatory anchor its astronomical and earth-science programmes. Institutions in Manaus focus on Amazonian biodiversity and hydrology, linking the older tradition of field exploration to present-day monitoring.

Current research and open questions

Timing and routes of early human migration

Research on how people first reached South America increasingly relies on ancient genomes alongside excavated sites. A 2022 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B analysed ancient genomes from northeastern Brazil and compared them with individuals from Lagoa Santa, Uruguay and Panama. The authors read the pattern as evidence of migration along the Atlantic coast, a route that archaeology had not emphasised before (archaeological evidence had centred on the Pacific side and the Andes) a distinct relationship between ancient genomes from Northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa, Uruguay and Panama, representing evidence for ancient migration routes along South America's Atlantic coast. The same study found greater Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals, and a strong Australasian signal in an ancient genome from Panama. The authors left these signals unexplained and described their work as a starting point for finer regional studies presents a starting point for future fine-scale investigations on the regional level.

Larger studies published in 2019 in Cell and Science added further complexity. One reported two previously unknown populations that also entered South America, and the other suggested a later dispersal from Mexico or Central America about 8,700 years ago. The open questions include how many separate migration waves reached the continent, how the archaic hominin admixture is dated, and how the sparse and poorly preserved sample from tropical lowlands limits what can be inferred. Dating of the Denisovan-related admixture remains tentative.

Amazon resilience and possible tipping points

Whether the Amazon could shift abruptly into a drier, more open ecosystem is one of the central questions in climate science. A 2024 study in Nature judged that half of the Amazon forest will cross tipping points by 2050 plausible but not inevitable, and concluded that a catastrophic collapse of the entire forest is unlikely during this century. Its estimate ranged widely, from between 10% and 47% of Amazonian forests undergoing sudden transitions by 2050.

Satellite records have been used to test whether the forest is losing its capacity to recover from shocks. Analyses based on three decades of satellite data monitoring vegetation recovery after droughts and fires found the Amazon has been losing its resilience for at least 20 years. Studies published in 2026 have pulled in different directions. One Nature paper found the forest heals faster than expected, but takes longer to fully recover its biodiversity after extreme events, while a PNAS study reported the forest is more resilient to fires than anticipated and shows no sign of transitioning to savanna. The same authors warn that the new ecosystems forming after disturbance are more vulnerable to later climate shocks. A further Nature modelling study put the threshold at deforestation of 22-28% of the rainforest, combined with 1.5-1.9° Celsius of global warming, and about 17-18% of the Amazon is deforested. Key uncertainties include the strength of rainfall feedbacks in forest canopies, how repeated fire changes biodiversity at forest edges, and how much deforestation and warming would interact. The results depend heavily on model assumptions, which is why estimates of timing differ.

Andean glaciers and urban water security

Andean glaciers act as seasonal reservoirs, and in many basins they supply the largest share of runoff during dry periods. La Paz illustrates the dependence. La Paz relies on glaciers for 15 percent of its water on average; during dry months this number bumps up to 61 percent, and during the driest month of a drought year, it rises to 85 percent. Estimates of glacier loss vary by source and period: official figures cited by the Bolivian government put the loss at between 37% and 42% over the last 30 years, while another analysis gives a figure of 43 percent between 1986 and 2014 for the Bolivian Andes. During the 2016 drought, scientists pointed to rapid glacier retreat, booming urban migration, rising temperatures and a particularly strong El Niño event as the combined causes of the crisis. Because the headwaters of many Amazonian rivers lie in the Andes, the same retreat also affects the river systems of the lowlands with repercussions for the Amazon basin.

Current research focuses on the timing of peak meltwater, the reliability of dry-season flows once ice cover falls below a threshold, and the hydropower dependence that Andean countries share. Meanwhile, infrastructure losses limit the value of any water source. An audit found that 45 percent of La Paz's water is lost through leaks. Monitoring stations in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes are being installed to plan future supply. Scenario planning must therefore combine glacier modelling with urban growth projections, irrigation demand and groundwater management.

Gaps in biodiversity inventories

The Amazon is estimated to hold a large share of the planet's species; one commonly cited figure holds that the Amazon is home to more than 10% of Earth's biodiversity. Many of these species remain undescribed, and inventories are concentrated along rivers, roads and research stations. Large areas of the Guiana Highlands, the upper Andean slopes, the Chaco and the interior of the Amazon basin are sampled far less intensively. The scientific work needed includes standardised surveys across seasons, expansion of taxonomic expertise in the region, DNA barcoding and environmental DNA sampling, camera-trap networks and remote-sensing tools that link species records to habitat types. Documentation is also needed for endemic and high-richness groups such as insects, fungi and small vertebrates, whose distributions are poorly known. Global frameworks such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework depend on such baseline data to set and monitor targets.

References

1. South America Location, Map & Physical Regions - Lessonstudy.com
2. South America - an overviewsciencedirect.com
3. Maps of South America - Nations Online Projectnationsonline.org
4. South America - Studentskids.britannica.com
5. How Many Countries in South America?whatarethe7continents.com
6. South America Continentwhatarethe7continents.com
7. graphsearch.epfl.chgraphsearch.epfl.ch
8. www.eionet.europa.eueionet.europa.eu
9. ABC islandsen.wikipedia.org
10. Southern Caribbeanen.wikipedia.org
11. Trinidad and Tobagobritannica.com
12. Category:Maps of the Dutch Caribbean - Wikimedia Commonscommons.wikimedia.org
13. Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, The ABC Islands - in a Nutshell - Sue Travelssuetravels.com
14. Caribbean Mapvamoscaribe.com
15. of2015 1031 Epubs.usgs.gov
16. What Plates Formed the Andes Mountains? - ScienceInsightsscienceinsights.org
17. d41586 019 00160 7media.nature.com
18. Nazca Plate - an overviewsciencedirect.com
19. Nazca Ridgeen.wikipedia.org
20. Amazonian Cratonen.wikipedia.org
21. List of shields and cratonsen.wikipedia.org
22. Ups and downs of the Guiana Shield and Amazon Basin over the last 500 Myr - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
23. Brazil and the Guianas - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
24. Gondwana Supercontinent Overview & Map - Lessonstudy.com
25. What is Gondwana?livescience.com
26. Gondwana - New World Encyclopedianewworldencyclopedia.org
27. Mesozoic rifting evolution of SW Gondwana: A poly-phased, subduction-related, extensional history responsible for basin formation along the Argentinean Atlantic margin - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
28. The Story of Gondwana - Inala Natureinalanature.com.au
29. Paleoproterozoic evolution of the Guiana Shield in Suriname: A revised modelcambridge.org
30. Guiana Shielden.wikipedia.org
31. ADGEO - New insights into the Gondwana breakup at the Southern South America by apatite fission-track analysesadgeo.copernicus.org
32. Altiplanoen.wikipedia.org
33. Lake Titicacaen.wikipedia.org
34. The Andes - Mountain Field Guidemountainfieldguide.com
35. Andesanimalia.bio
36. Tepuibritannica.com
37. Tepuien.wikipedia.org
38. Gran Sabanaen.wikipedia.org
39. Auy%C3%A1n-tepuien.wikipedia.org
40. Brazilian Highlandsen.wikipedia.org
41. Plateaus in South America: Major Plateaus and Highlands - Plateaus.orgplateaus.org
42. Gran Chacoen.wikipedia.org
43. Pampasen.wikipedia.org
44. Landforms of Argentina: mountains, glaciers & moreblogpatagonia.australis.com
45. South America 3D Elevation Map: Aconcagua (22,838 ft) to Laguna del Carbón (−344 ft)3delevationmap.com
46. Amazon basinbritannica.com
47. The Amazon Rainforestworldrainforests.com
48. AMAZON RIVER BASINoas.org
49. graphsearch.epfl.chgraphsearch.epfl.ch
50. South America - Rivers, Amazon, Andesbritannica.com
51. Rainwater is insufficient to replenish the Guarani Aquifer owing to overuse and drought, study warnseurekalert.org
52. (PDF) Guarani Aquifer System: from regional reserves to local useresearchgate.net
53. Preserving the Guarani Aquifer: A Global Benchmark - We Are Waterwearewater.org
54. Brazilian Well Taps Guarani Aquifer, Sparking Debate on Water Supply and Security - CPG Click Oil and Gasen.clickpetroleoegas.com.br
55. Discrepancies in precipitation trends between observational and reanalysis datasets in the Amazon Basinnature.com
56. HESS - The influence of water table depth on evapotranspiration in the Amazon arc of deforestationhess.copernicus.org
57. Atmospheric moisture contribution to the growing season in the Amazon arc of deforestation - IOPscienceiopscience.iop.org
58. Tipping Point Archives - MAAPmaapprogram.org
59. Population dynamics shifts by climate change: High-resolution future mid-century trends for South America - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
60. Atacama Deserten.wikipedia.org
61. Atacama Desert ecosystemebsco.com
62. Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on South Americanature.com
63. Observed streamflow data shows El Niño–Southern Oscillation increases likelihood of extreme events in South Americanature.com
64. (a) Köppen–Geiger climate classification map for South America. Where...researchgate.net
65. Climate classificationen.wikipedia.org
66. Is South America Tropicalpedalchile.com
67. Köppen–Geiger climate classification present-day map (1980–2016) for...researchgate.net
68. Why Is the Atacama Desert So Dry? - Biology Insightsbiologyinsights.com
69. Rain shadow — Grokipediagrokipedia.com
70. Humboldt Current LMEstorymaps.arcgis.com
71. El Niño-Southern Oscillationdlab.epfl.ch
72. (PDF) Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on South Americaresearchgate.net
73. Fast facts: the Amazon biome - #ThinkLandscapethinklandscape.globallandscapesforum.org
74. The discovery of the Amazonian tree flora with an updated checklist of all known tree taxancbi.nlm.nih.gov
75. About the Amazonwwf.panda.org
76. (PDF) Cerrado, Caatinga, Gran Chaco and Mata Atlântica: South American flagships of biodiversityresearchgate.net
77. Diversity and conservation of legumes in the Gran Chaco and biogeograpical inferencesjournals.plos.org
78. Caatinga Dry Woodlandebsco.com
79. (PDF) Mammals of the Cerrado and Caatinga: Distribution Patterns of the Tropical Open Biomes of Central South Americaresearchgate.net
80. Caatinga - an overviewsciencedirect.com
81. Land cover changes in the Brazilian Cerrado and Caatinga biomes from 1990 to 2010 based on a systematic remote sensing sampling approach - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
82. Georeferenced location of Cerrado (Ce), Chaco (Ch), and Caatinga SDTF...researchgate.net
83. Full article: A Broad Transition from Cloud Forest to Páramo Characterizes an Undisturbed Treeline in Parque Nacional Llanganates, Ecuadortandfonline.com
84. Tierra fr%C3%ADaen.wikipedia.org
85. Paramo - an overviewsciencedirect.com
86. Northern Andean p%C3%A1ramoen.wikipedia.org
87. (PDF) The Andean Cloud Forestresearchgate.net
88. Tierra heladaen.wikipedia.org
89. Crustal faults in the Chilean Andes: geological constraints and seismic potentialredalyc.org
90. M 8.2 - 93 km NW of Iquique, Chileearthquake.usgs.gov
91. Spatial distribution of earthquakes and subduction of the Nazca plate beneath South Americapubs.geoscienceworld.org
92. 1960 Valdivia earthquakeen.wikipedia.org
93. 1947 Satipo earthquakeen.wikipedia.org
94. NHESS - Volcanic risk ranking and regional mapping of the Central Volcanic Zone of the Andesnhess.copernicus.org
95. Andean Volcanic Belten.wikipedia.org
96. Volcanoes in Colombia — Complete List, Map & Eruption Historyvolcanosatlas.com
97. volcano colombia hazard: Topics by Science.govscience.gov
98. Muography in Colombia: simulation framework, instrumentation and data analysisarxiv.org
99. Cotopaxien.wikipedia.org
100. The new record of drought and warmth in the Amazon in 2023 related to regional and global climatic featuresnature.com
101. Historic drought in the Amazon, explaineddialogue.earth
102. Major Rivers in the Amazon Drop to Record-Low Water Levels - EcoWatchecowatch.com
103. Extreme drought and heat from the last El Niño signal a 'new normal' for tropical forestsphys.org
104. The Drought of Amazonia in 2023-2024scirp.org
105. Monte Verde, one of the earliest Indigenous sites in South America, is much younger than thought, study claims. But others call it 'egregiously poor geological work.'livescience.com
106. Study suggests younger age for Chile’s important Monte Verde archaeological sitewhbl.com
107. Monte Verdeen.wikipedia.org
108. Caral-Supe: the Oldest Civilization in the Americascountryreports.org
109. Pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon Basinen.wikipedia.org
110. Terra pretaen.wikipedia.org
111. Cassava - an overviewsciencedirect.com
112. What We Can Learn From Ancient Amazonian Soil, Terra Pretafoodunfolded.com
113. Monte Verde fieldwork resets age of famous South American archaeological sitephys.org
114. Caralen.wikipedia.org
115. The Incredible Finds From Caral-Supe, Americas’ Oldest Civilizationthecollector.com
116. Huaricangaen.wikipedia.org
117. Amazonian crops domesticated 10,000 years agopsu.edu
118. Final Report Summary - PAST (Pre-Columbian Amazon-Scale Transformations)cordis.europa.eu
119. Treaty of Tordesillas - Memory of the Worldunesco.org
120. Treaty of Tordesillasen.wikipedia.org
121. Guayaquil Conferenceen.wikipedia.org
122. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Guiana - Wikisource, the free online libraryen.wikisource.org
123. History of French Guianaen.wikipedia.org
124. This Land is Your Land: Guyanascalar.chapman.edu
125. British Guiana, 1868-1938britishonlinearchives.com
126. Bolívar and San Martín: Two Liberators, Two Visions, and the Making of a ... - History 360 - Google Booksbooks.google.com
127. Saylor URL: www.saylor.org/hist303 Sub-subunit 4.3.2 The Saylor Foundationresources.saylor.org
128. South American Wars of Independence (Nineteenth Century)encyclopedia.com
129. Dutch colonisation of the Guianasen.wikipedia.org
130. The History of Guyanachimuadventures.com
131. The South American Revolutionscourses.lumenlearning.com
132. Jos%C3%A9 de San Mart%C3%ADnen.wikipedia.org
133. South America Population, Countries, Land Area & Density 2025worldostats.com
134. World Population by Country 2026 — South America - Everything Econeconcoaching.com
135. Mapped: South America’s Biggest Cities in 2025visualcapitalist.com
136. List of Latin American cities by GDP (PPP)en.wikipedia.org
137. Rural-to-urban migration in Latin America: An update and thoughts on the modelresearchgate.net
138. Urbanization and Internal Migration Patterns in Latin Americarrojasdatabank.info
139. Urbanization in Latin America and the Caribbean Region: Building inclusive & sustainable citiesunhabitat.org
140. Understanding urban densification in Latin American cities: determinants of the production of built space in informal areas in Bogota (2007-2018) - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
141. South American countries by population 2025 - StatisticsTimes.comstatisticstimes.com
142. 2024 in South Americaen.wikipedia.org
143. Population size in South Americatheglobaleconomy.com
144. Demographics of Brazilen.wikipedia.org
145. List of largest metropolitan areas in the Americasen.wikipedia.org
146. Demographic Trends and Urbanizationfiveable.me
147. Introductionfrontiersin.org
148. Languages of South Americaen.wikipedia.org
149. LANGASen.wikipedia.org
150. Guarani languageen.wikipedia.org
151. Languages of South America: The Most Spoken and Indigenous South American Languages (2026)tomedes.com
152. Indigenous peoples of South Americaen.wikipedia.org
153. Ethnic groups in Latin Americaen.wikipedia.org
154. Racial inequality in Latin Americaacademic.oup.com
155. Peruviansen.wikipedia.org
156. Demographics of South Americaen.wikipedia.org
157. Genomic Insights into the Ancestry and Demographic History of South Americancbi.nlm.nih.gov
158. Catholicism Has Declined in Latin America Since 2013-14pewresearch.org
159. Pew: Catholicism down in Latin America; belief in God 'remains high'angelusnews.com
160. Catholicism shrinks in Latin America while more are religiously unaffiliated, Pew surveys findwlrn.org
161. Pew: Catholicism down in Latin America, but belief in God ‘remains high’ - OSV Newsosvnews.com
162. A Look Back: 60 Years Since Brazil Sparked South America's Era of Dictatorships - The Rio Timesriotimesonline.com
163. Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) - Brazil-U.S. Relations - Research Guides at Library of Congressguides.loc.gov
164. Military dictatorship in Brazilen.wikipedia.org
165. Chilean transition to democracyen.wikipedia.org
166. Democracy and Foreign Policy in the Southern Cone of Latin America, by Mauricio Santoro Rocha - OLAobservatorylatinamerica.org
167. Military Rule Comes to Democratic Uruguayebsco.com
168. Latin America Shows That Democratization Is Possible Anywherefreedomhouse.org
169. Politics and the Military in Latin America - Canning Housecanninghouse.org
170. Mercosur: South America’s Fractious Trade Bloc - WITAwita.org
171. Just the Factseuropeanmovement.ie
172. Explainer: What Is Mercosur?as-coa.org
173. CARICOMjis.gov.jm
174. Our work with CARICOM - Foreign Affairs and Foreign Tradeforeign.gov.bb
175. History of the Caribbean Community - CARICOMcaricom.org
176. Guyana and Suriname can underpin CARICOM’s sovereignty and prosperity - Caribbean News Globalcaribbeannewsglobal.com
177. WORLD VIEW: Guyana and Suriname can underpin Caricom’s sovereignty and prosperitytribune242.com
178. Caribbean Community: CARICOM - Black History Month 2026blackhistorymonth.org.uk
179. Democracy Returns to Brazilebsco.com
180. List of South American countries by GDPstatisticstimes.com
181. The Richest Countries In South America 2025worldatlas.com
182. Economy of South Americaen.wikipedia.org
183. South America’s Lithium Triangle Reshapes Global Trade Through Resource Nationalism - Catalystcatalystmcgill.com
184. China’s New Playbook for Latin Americaamericasquarterly.org
185. China in Latin America: December 2025cfr.org
186. BRIEFING EPRSeuroparl.europa.eu
187. China tightening its grip on Latin Americagisreportsonline.com
188. China’s Growing Influence in Latin Americacfr.org
189. GDP per capita of South American countries 2025 - StatisticsTimes.comm.statisticstimes.com
190. Bringing the state back in the lithium triangle: An institutional analysis of resource nationalism in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia - ScienceDirectsciencedirect.com
191. The Itaipu Dam: The Changing Energy Landscape in South America — Columbia Political Reviewcpreview.org
192. Itaipú Dam Explained, the Brazil-Paraguay Power Dealriotimesonline.com
193. Draft for Consultation 1/10 Itaipu Hydroelectric Dam (Brazilcdn.gihub.org
194. Itaipu Hydroelectric Damgihub.org
195. Itaipu Damen.wikipedia.org
196. Renewable energy in Latin America: 5 trends to be aware of — RatedPowerratedpower.com
197. Brazil - Ember-energy.orgember-energy.org
198. Curtailment in Chileen.wikipedia.org
199. Electricity sector in Chileen.wikipedia.org
200. Uruguay - Energytrade.gov
201. Electricity sector in Uruguayen.wikipedia.org
202. These 10 Countries Scaled Renewable Energy the Fastestwri.org
203. Amazon Riveren.wikipedia.org
204. Manaus: Deep-water inland portbairdmaritime.com
205. Port of Manausen.wikipedia.org
206. Amazon Riverpersonal.utdallas.edu
207. Amazon deforestation falls to 10-year low in first half of 2026news.mongabay.com
208. Amazon Deforestation Hits A 10-Year Low (2026 Update)queenoftheforest.org
209. Brazil Amazon 2026: Deforestation, Carbon Credits, Lula Agendariotimesonline.com
210. Brazil deforestation hits new low in Amazonphys.org
211. Amazon Deforestation at Eight-Year Low, Report Shows - Inside Climate Newsinsideclimatenews.org
212. mercury pollution amazonbassconnections.duke.edu
213. Amazon forests capture high levels of atmospheric mercury pollution from artisanal gold miningnature.com
214. Inside the fight against illegal mining in the Amazon - Greenpeace Internationalgreenpeace.org
215. Critical minerals drive legalization of mining on Amazon Indigenous landsnews.mongabay.com
216. EGU - News - Unprecedented glacier melting in the Andes blamed on climate changeegu.eu
217. Monitoring tropical glaciers in Bolivia contributes to water security in La Paz and El Alto, bringing benefits to the Amazon Basin - OTCAotca.org
218. Contribution of glacier runoff to water resources of La Paz city, Bolivia (16° S)cambridge.org
219. 4 Andean Cities Adapting to Glacier Retreat to Preserve Water Securitythecityfix.com
220. Bolivia expects to lose glacier within yearnbcnews.com
221. Retreat of Andean Glaciers Foretells Global Water Woese360.yale.edu
222. Amazon deforestation on pace to be the lowest on record, says Brazilnews.mongabay.com
223. Francisco de Orellanabritannica.com
224. Orellana, Francisco De (c. 1511–1546)encyclopedia.com
225. Gaspar de Carvajalen.wikipedia.org
226. Alexander von Humboldtbritannica.com
227. Humboldt’s Atlas of Latin America, 1799-1804digital.library.sc.edu
228. Humboldt and Bonpland's Expeditionebsco.com
229. American Expedition 1799%E2%80%931804en.wikipedia.org
230. Astronomical Observatories and Indigenous Communities in Chileastrobites.org
231. Atacama Observatoryars.electronica.art
232. Francisco de Orellanaen.wikipedia.org
233. Humboldt and Latin America (1799-1804)sites.usnh.edu
234. Watch the Skies: Stargazing and Astronomy in the Atacama Desertcascada.travel
235. Atacama Pathfinder Experimenten.wikipedia.org
236. Genomic evidence for ancient human migration routes along South America's Atlantic coastroyalsocietypublishing.org
237. What ancient DNA reveals about the first humans in the Americasnationalgeographic.com
238. Amazon rainforest nearing tipping points, study findsaxios.com
239. Amazon Rain Forest Nears Dangerous 'Tipping Point'scientificamerican.com
240. New studies portray Amazon as surprisingly resilient, but tipping point loomsnews.mongabay.com
241. Deforestation and warming could push Amazon to tipping point by 2040s: Studynews.mongabay.com
242. Bolivia installs glacier monitoring stations and makes progress in protecting the water that supplies 1.8 million people in La Paz and El Alto - OTCAotca.org
243. Ancient DNA analyses add new complexity to South America settlementnews.emory.edu
244. Ancient DNA analysis sheds light on the early peopling of South Americasciencedaily.com
245. Preserving the Tropical Glaciers of the Andes, Protecting the Amazon - Amazon Basin Projectaguasamazonicas.otca.org