South America travel guide

Arequipa is built almost entirely from sillar, a white volcanic stone quarried from the three volcanoes overlooking the city — enough of it that the whole historic center reflects sunlight back with a genuine, unmistakable glow that earned it the nickname "the White City."

Paraguay's capital is one of the oldest cities in South America, founded in 1537, old enough that it served as the administrative base for Spanish colonization of a territory that once included parts of four other modern countries.

Bariloche looks so much like the Swiss Alps that its own founders built the town in a deliberately Alpine style on purpose — chocolate shops, alpine chalets, and a lake district so extensive it takes days just to see the highlights.

Bogotá sits so high in the Andes — over 2,600 meters — that visitors regularly get winded walking uphill on their first day, and the city has responded by closing over 120 kilometers of its main roads to cars every Sunday morning for a citywide bike event that's been running since 1974.

Brasília didn't grow into a capital — it was designed as one, from scratch, in the shape of an airplane, and built in under four years in the middle of an empty plateau specifically to force development into Brazil's neglected interior.

Argentines eat more beef per person than almost any nation on Earth, dance a tango that started in the city's brothels and dockside bars in the 1880s, and built a capital so deliberately modeled on Paris that locals still call it "the Paris of South America."

Cali calls itself the salsa capital of the world, and it backs the claim with an annual world championship — locals learn to dance here before most kids elsewhere learn to ride a bike.

Spain spent over 200 years building walls around Cartagena to keep pirates and English privateers out, including Francis Drake himself — the fortifications worked well enough that they're still almost entirely intact, wrapping a genuinely lived-in colonial city rather than a museum piece.

The Inca built stone walls so precisely fitted that you still can't slide a knife blade between the blocks 500 years later — and Cusco was their capital, the literal center of an empire that stretched further than the Roman Empire at its peak.

This island city holds more than 40 beaches on a single stretch of Brazilian coastline, ranging from calm family bays to some of South America's most consistent surf breaks — locals just call it "Floripa" and treat the whole island like a long weekend that never quite ends.

Guayaquil spent decades known mainly as Ecuador's rougher port city — then it rebuilt its entire riverfront into a two-and-a-half-kilometer public promenade and turned a formerly dangerous hillside slum into one of its most colorful, visited neighborhoods.

Iguazú Falls is wider than Niagara and taller than Victoria Falls, and the comparison locals love to repeat is Eleanor Roosevelt's reported first reaction on seeing it: "Poor Niagara."

La Paz sits so high — over 3,600 meters at its lowest point — that the city built the largest urban cable car network on Earth just to move people up and down the canyon it's built into, since regular buses and roads couldn't handle the terrain.

Lima has more restaurants on the World's 50 Best list than almost any other city on Earth, and the ceviche recipe locals insist is the only real one uses fish that never touches a stove — cooked entirely by citrus acid in a matter of minutes.

Medellín was once ranked the most dangerous city on Earth in the early 1990s — now it runs a cable car system built specifically to connect its poorest hillside neighborhoods to the city center, a transportation-as-social-policy project so effective that urban planners now study it worldwide.

Argentina's driest wine region produces some of its best wine — Mendoza sits in a literal desert, and every vineyard here survives on a 600-year-old irrigation system originally engineered by the indigenous Huarpe people, still carrying snowmelt down from the Andes today.

Uruguay legalized marijuana and same-sex marriage years before most of the world and has one of Latin America's highest standards of living — and its capital has a 22-kilometer waterfront promenade that's just... mostly empty, even in a city of 1.3 million people.

Uruguay's most famous beach resort has a sculpture of five giant fingers reaching up out of the sand, installed in 1982 as a warning about drowning — it's now one of the most photographed spots in the country for entirely different reasons.

Quito's historic center was one of the first two sites UNESCO ever named to its World Heritage list in 1978, tied with Krakow — and the city sits close enough to the equator that you can stand with one foot in each hemisphere at a monument just outside town.

Christ the Redeemer took nine years to build and stands on a mountain that's part of a national park inside city limits — Rio has more urban rainforest within its borders than almost any other major city on Earth.

Salvador was Brazil's first capital for over two centuries and the main port of the entire Atlantic slave trade into the Americas — today it has the largest Afro-Brazilian population and culture of any city in the country, most visible in the historic Pelourinho square where that painful history and its resulting culture collide most directly.

You can ski the Andes and be back in downtown Santiago for dinner the same day — a handful of major resorts sit less than two hours from a capital city of over 6 million people, a combination almost no other capital in the world can genuinely offer.

São Paulo has more Michelin-starred restaurants and a bigger Japanese population than any city outside Japan itself — a metropolis of over 12 million people that barely registers on most first-time South America itineraries.

Ushuaia calls itself "the end of the world," and the claim holds up better than most marketing slogans — it's the southernmost city on Earth with a real airport and hotels, closer to Antarctica than to most of the rest of Argentina.

Valparaíso's steep hills got so impossible to climb on foot that the city built over a dozen antique funicular elevators starting in the 1880s — several are still running today, more than any other city in the world, hauling residents past walls covered in some of the best street art in South America.