7 Amazing Places To Visit In South America
South America is a land of contrasts, from its tropic north through to its Sub-Antarctic south, the continnennt offers a wide variety of places to visit. Here’s seven amazing places to you can visit in South America.
1. The Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Best known perhaps through documentaries, the Galápagos Islands and its surrounding waters form an Ecuadorian province, a national park, and a biological marine reserve.
Documented most famously by Charles Darwin in the 19th Century, the Islands offer an amazing and unique variety of wildlife unlike anywhere else in the world.
Getting there is not cheap, owing to travel restrictions and the remote nature of the archipelago. Flights come from Guayaquil or Quito airports, and only fly at limited times. That aside though, how many of your friends could say that you’ve visited the Galapagos.
2. The Inca City of Machu Picchu, Peru
Machu Picchu is a pre-Columbian 15th-century Inca site located 2,430 metres (7,970 ft) above sea level.
The Incas started building the city around AD 1400, but abandoned it a century later at the time of the Spanish Conquest. It was unknown to the outside world before being brought to international attention in 1911 by the American historian Hiram Bingham.
3. The Iguazu Falls, Argentina/ Brazil
Iguazu Falls are waterfalls of the Iguazu River located on the border of the Brazilian State of Paraná and the Argentine Province of Misiones.
There are two international airports close to Iguazú Falls: the Argentine Cataratas del Iguazú International Airport (IGR) and the Brazilian Foz do Iguaçu International Airport (IGU). Both offer connections to the falls, including taxi and bus tours.
Famously Eleanor Roosevelt once reportedly exclaimed that the Iguanzu falls was a “Poor Niagara,” and yet the falls are often compared with Southern Africa’s Victoria Falls which separates Zambia and Zimbabwe.
4. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rio de Janeiro needs very little introduction. The city is famous for its beaches Copacabana and Ipanema, for the giant Jesus statue known as Christ the Redeemer on the Corcovado mountain, for the Sugar Loaf Mountain and… for its unequalled nightlife.
Whilst also somewhat known for its crime problem, sticking to tourist areas is usually fairly safe, and Rio de Janeiro continues to be a very popular destination for a reason.
5. The Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat at 10,582 square kilometers (4,086 sq mi).
It is covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness with the average altitude variations within one meter over the entire area of the Salar. The Salar serves as the major transport route across the Bolivian Altiplano and is a major breeding ground for several species of pink flamingos.
Salar de Uyuni attracts tourists from around the world and local hotels are built from salt, the only natural material available in the area.
6. Moai statues of the Easter island, Chile
The large stone statues, or moai, for which Easter Island is world-famous, were carved from 1100–1680. A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections so far. Although often identified as “Easter Island heads”, the statues are actually torsos, with most of them ending at the top of the thighs, although a small number of them are complete, with the figures kneeling on bent knees with their hands over their stomachs.
Travel isn’t easy, with flights to Easter Island from Lan Airlines and, seasonally, subsidiaries such as Lan Peru.
7. The Amazon, (primarily) Brazil
No list of places to visit in South America can be complete without the inclusion of the Amazon rainforest.
The worlds largest forest at five and a half million square kilometers (1.4 billion acres), the Amazon offers some of the last untouched areas on planet earth.
There are a large variety of tours available from the nine different countries the Amazon extends into.
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About the Author
Duncan Riley Editor & Publisher Duncan Riley started blogging in 2003 after a career of management and Government service. In 2003 he started the Blog Herald, the first blog to cover the then new industry of blogging. In 2005 he was one of the three founders of b5media After a 12 month stint at TechCrunch, writing as the No.2 to Michael Arrington, Duncan left to found The Inquisitr and now runs both Medacity and fortytwotimes. Follow on Twitter at: duncanriley
