The world’s southernmost country is a Pacific Andean ribbon
Chile is the southernmost country on Earth and the nearest to Antarctica, a slender strip pressed between the Andes and the Pacific. Its 2024 census counted 18.5 million people across 756,102 square kilometres, and the Mapuche people of its south-central valleys held off both the Inca and the Spanish.
The Inca pushed into the north, but after a bloody three-day battle their advance halted at the Maule River. The Mapuche, nearly two million strong today and South America's largest Indigenous group, live mainly in Chile's Central Valley. A great Mapuche uprising in 1553 killed the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, who had founded Santiago on 12 February 1541, and further revolts in 1598 and 1655 pushed the colony's frontier north again.
Stone tools suggest people visited the Monte Verde area as long as 18,500 years ago. Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to set foot there in 1520, and Diego de Almagro's expedition from Peru in 1535–36 spread the name Chile. Its origin is disputed: theories include an Inca version of a local chief's name, a Mapuche word for where the land ends, and a Quechua word for cold.
Walled in by desert, Mapuche country, the Andes and the ocean, the colony became one of the most centralised in Spanish America. Napoleon's seizure of Spain spurred a junta on 18 September 1810, now the national day. After years of fighting, Bernardo O'Higgins and José de San Martín led an army over the Andes, and independence was proclaimed on 12 February 1818. In the nineteenth century Chile expanded, finally crushing Mapuche resistance in the 1880s.
Twentieth-century Chile democratised, urbanised and leaned increasingly on copper exports. Deep polarisation ended in the coup of 11 September 1973, backed by the United States, which ousted Salvador Allende's elected left-wing government. Today it is a high-income economy, among the most stable in South America, and it joined the OECD in 2010.
Source: Chile
