From the parched but mineral-rich Atacama Desert to haunting Torres del Paine National Park and beyond to stormy Cape Horn, “Chile,” wrote Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, “was invented by a poet.” This elongated country, wedged between the deepest ocean and the longest mountain chain, straddles a tectonically unstable region.

 Chileans once enjoyed Latin America’s longest tradition of political stability and civil liberty. But in 1973 a bloody coup overthrew Salvador Allende’s Marxist government and ushered in 16 years of dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Democracy was restored in 1989. Privatization of industries and increased agricultural exports have boosted the economy. The Chuquicamata and Escondida copper mines rank as the world’s largest. Oil from the Strait of Magellan eases reliance on imported fuel, and negotiations with Argentina are under way for a trans-Andean natural gas pipeline. 

Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World Revised Sixth Edition, 1995