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Know Chile
Chile is a country of startling contrasts and
extreme beauty, with attractions ranging
from the towering volcanic peaks of the
Andes to the ancient forests of the Lake
District. There are a multitude of very
good parks here, and plenty of opportunities
for fine adventure travel. Chile is justly
famous as the location of Torres del Paine,
considered by many to be the finest nature
travel destination in all of South America.
For anyone who has ever been fascinated by geography,
the long, impossibly thin line of Chile has
always produced a tiny moment of astonishment.
Chile stretches over 4,300 km (2,700 mi)
along the southwestern coast of South America,
a distance roughly the same as that from San
Francisco to New York, or Edinburgh to Baghdad.
At the same time, its width never exceeds 240 km
(150 mi), making the country more than eighteen
times longer than its widest point.
 To the north,
The most obvious factor in Chile's remarkable
slenderness is the massive, virtually impassable
wall of the Andes, a mountain range that is still
rising and that contains more than fifty active
volcanic peaks. The western border is of course
the Pacific Ocean, but it is a misconception
to picture Chile as nothing more than the steep
western slope of the Andean peaks.
All along
its length Chile is marked by a narrow depression
between the mountains and the sea. To the
north the land rises and becomes more arid,
until one reaches the forbidding Atacama
Desert, one of the most inhospitable regions
on earth. To the south just the opposite
transformation takes place: the land falls
away, and the region between mountains
and ocean fades into the baffling maze
of small islands that terminates in
Chilean Patagonia.
Chile's southern
extremity is marked by Cape Horn, a
treacherous headland surrounded by almost continuously
storm-tossed seas and passable only through the foggy stillness
of the Strait of Magellan.
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