South America
A continent of the Andes, the Amazon, and dazzling extremes
South America fills roughly 17.8 million square kilometers (6.9 million square miles), a triangle of land tapering south from the warm Caribbean toward the cold seas off Cape Horn. Joined to North America only by the slender isthmus of Panama, it spent tens of millions of years as an island continent, evolving a distinctive web of life. Within its borders sit the world's largest rainforest, its longest mountain range, its highest waterfall, and its driest desert.
The Andes run unbroken for some 7,000 kilometers down the western edge, the longest continental mountain range on Earth, cresting at Aconcagua's 6,961 meters (22,837 feet). To the east, the Amazon River drains a basin the size of the contiguous United States, discharging more water than the next several largest rivers combined and feeding a rainforest that holds a tenth of all known species. Between them lie the grasslands of the Pampas, the wetlands of the Pantanal, and the Atacama Desert, where some weather stations have never recorded rain.
About 438 million people live in South America, most of them within reach of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the great river cities of the interior. The continent's geography — towering cordillera, impenetrable jungle, and open plain — shaped the Inca and earlier Andean civilizations and continues to make it one of the most biologically and culturally rich regions on the planet.