A line drawn by the Pope
Why does BRAZIL speak Portuguese while almost every other country in South America speaks Spanish? In 1494, two years after Columbus's first voyage, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the newly reached lands between them along an imaginary line down the Atlantic, with the Pope's blessing. Everything to the west would be Spanish, everything to the east Portuguese. When Portuguese sailors reached the coast of South America in 1500, the eastern bulge of the continent fell on their side of the line, and the colony grew far inland from there.
Brazil takes its name from brazilwood, a tree whose red heartwood was used to make a valuable dye, and which was the colony's first big export. GUYANA speaks English and SURINAME Dutch, because they were colonised by Britain and the Netherlands.
Named after the middle of the world
ECUADOR is simply the Spanish word for equator, which crosses the country just north of its capital, Quito. Its Galápagos Islands, around a thousand kilometres out in the Pacific, are home to giant tortoises, marine iguanas that dive for seaweed, and finches whose different beaks helped Charles Darwin think about how living things change over time. BOLIVIA is named after Simón Bolívar, the general who led much of the continent to independence from Spain in the early 1800s, and VENEZUELA means little Venice, a name given by explorers who saw village houses built on stilts over a lake.
Several countries were named for what their first European visitors hoped to find there, or thought they saw: ARGENTINA for silver, as our countries page explains, and COLOMBIA after Christopher Columbus, though he never set foot there.
Salt, mirrors and power
High in the Andes of BOLIVIA lies the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, a dazzling white plain of more than ten thousand square kilometres left behind by ancient lakes. It is so flat that scientists use it to check the instruments on satellites that measure height from space. After rain, a thin layer of water turns it into the biggest mirror on Earth, reflecting the sky so perfectly that the horizon disappears.
PARAGUAY and Brazil share the Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River, one of the largest producers of hydroelectric power in the world, which supplies most of Paraguay's electricity.
Mountains, grasslands and the end of the world
The ANDES run down the whole western side of the continent for about 7,000 kilometres, the longest mountain range on land. High in the Peruvian Andes stood CUSCO, the capital of the INCA empire, whose people herded the LLAMA and whose language, QUECHUA, is still spoken by millions of people today. Our Incas page covers the empire.
East of the mountains, the PAMPAS of ARGENTINA and URUGUAY are vast, flat grasslands where cowboys called gauchos herded cattle on horseback. In the far south, PATAGONIA is a wild land of glaciers, wind and sheep farms, and its southern tip, near Cape Horn, is the closest the continent comes to Antarctica. The TANGO grew up in the working-class neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late 1800s. The AMAZON rainforest covers much of the north, and the CARNIVAL of Rio fills the streets of Brazil every year before Lent. PERU, CHILE and PARAGUAY complete the grid.