Best of · South America
The 16 Most Beautiful Places in South America
16 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
South America holds some of the planet's most extreme and beautiful landscapes — the granite spires of Patagonia, the world's largest salt flat, the greatest rainforest on Earth, and waterfalls that dwarf anything in the north.
This is our editors' pick of the continent's most beautiful natural places, loosely ordered by the strength of the spectacle. Every one is a real, mapped place with an honest guide to reaching it and the best season to go.
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Torres del Paine Patagonia's crown
Magallanes, Chilean Patagonia
Blue granite towers soaring above windswept steppe, glaciers, and electric-blue lakes — the defining image of Chilean Patagonia and one of the world's great trekking parks.
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Salar de Uyuni The mirror of the sky
Altiplano, southwestern Bolivia
The world's largest salt flat, a blinding white plain that becomes a perfect mirror of the sky when a thin film of water covers it after rain.
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Iguazú Falls The great falls
Paraná, Brazil / Misiones, Argentina border
A two-mile arc of hundreds of waterfalls plunging through rainforest on the Argentina–Brazil border, culminating in the roaring Devil's Throat.
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Angel Falls The tallest fall
Canaima National Park, Venezuela
The highest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth, dropping nearly a kilometre from the rim of a table mountain deep in Venezuela's Gran Sabana.
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Perito Moreno Glacier
Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina
A vast, advancing wall of ice in Argentine Patagonia that calves great blocks into a turquoise lake with a crack like thunder, watched from walkways at its face.
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The Amazon Rainforest
Amazon Basin, Brazil (and neighbouring countries)
The greatest rainforest on Earth, a living system of unimaginable scale and diversity, best entered by river from lodges deep in the interior.
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Mount Fitz Roy
Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina
A serrated crown of granite towers on the Patagonian border, often wreathed in cloud and lit fiery red at dawn — a magnet for hikers and climbers.
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Rainbow Mountain (Vinicunca)
Cusco Region, Peruvian Andes
A ridge of mineral-striped slopes in the Peruvian Andes, banded in red, gold, and turquoise, reached on a high-altitude day hike above 5,000 metres.
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Moray The Inca laboratory
Maras district, Sacred Valley, Cusco Region, Peru
Concentric terrace bowls above the Sacred Valley in which the temperature falls measurably from the top ring down to the floor.
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The Galápagos Islands
Pacific Ocean, ~1,000 km west of Ecuador
The volcanic archipelago that shaped Darwin's thinking, where fearless wildlife — giant tortoises, marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies — lets you walk among it.
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Caño Cristales
Serranía de la Macarena, Meta, Colombia
Colombia's 'river of five colours', which blazes red, yellow, green, and blue for a few months a year as an endemic aquatic plant blooms across its bed.
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Lençóis Maranhenses
Maranhão, Brazil
A vast field of white dunes in northern Brazil that fills with thousands of rain-fed turquoise lagoons in the wet season — a desert you can swim in.
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Mount Roraima
Canaima National Park, Venezuela
A sheer-walled table mountain rising from the clouds at the meeting of three countries, its summit a lost world of black rock and endemic plants.
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The Pantanal
Mato Grosso & Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
The world's largest tropical wetland, and the best place in the Americas to see wild jaguars, along with vast numbers of birds and caiman.
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Lake Titicaca
Peru–Bolivia border, Andes
The highest large navigable lake on Earth, a deep blue Andean sea shared by Peru and Bolivia, dotted with reed islands and ancient traditions.
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Cocora Valley
Quindío, Coffee Region, Colombia
A green Andean valley where the world's tallest palms — the wax palms of Colombia — rise like slender columns above the cloud forest.
South America spans both hemispheres, so its seasons pull in opposite directions: Patagonia is best in the southern summer, while the tropical north and the Andes turn on the wet and dry cycles. Each guide notes the best window and how to reach it.
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