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Chile
A ribbon of land between the Andes and the Pacific
Chile is the longest, thinnest country in the world, a sliver of land more than 4,300 kilometers from the Atacama Desert in the north to the fjords and glaciers of the south, never more than about 350 kilometers wide. Pressed between the Andes and the Pacific, it packs an astonishing range of landscapes into that narrow frame, from the driest desert on Earth to temperate rainforest, volcanoes, and the windswept tip of Patagonia. Santiago, the capital, sits in a central valley beneath snowcapped peaks, the political and economic core of a stable, prosperous nation.
The Andes run the entire eastern length of the country, peaking at Ojos del Salado, at 6,891 meters the highest active volcano on Earth. The Atacama in the north is so arid that some weather stations have never recorded rain, yet it hides vast copper and lithium deposits that anchor the economy. The fertile central valley grows the grapes behind Chile's celebrated wines. Southward the land fractures into a maze of islands, fjords, and ice fields, and Chilean territory reaches across the Pacific to Easter Island, with its enigmatic moai statues.
Spanish colonization gave way to independence in 1818. Chile expanded northward after the War of the Pacific, securing the mineral-rich Atacama. The twentieth century brought democratic reform, the 1973 coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship, and an eventual return to democracy in 1990. Today Chile is among the most developed economies in Latin America, built heavily on copper exports, and a country actively reckoning with its constitution, inequality, and the legacy of its recent past.