Chile 🇨🇱

Chile lies in South America, part of the Americas. The long form of the name is Republic of Chile. The capital is Santiago.

Some 19.8 million people call it home, placing it 66th of 249 by population — between Chad above it and Romania below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 7th of 13 in size and 6th in population.

Its territory runs to 756,102 km², which ranks it 39th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Türkiye and just ahead of Zambia. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Türkiye.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 30.0° south, 71.0° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 3,340 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach South Africa, Lesotho and Norfolk Island — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 3: Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. The largest of them by area is Argentina, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 92.3 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Density comes out at around 26 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The one official language is Spanish. Spanish is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 22 other entries including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Colombia.

The demonym is Chilean, so residents are Chileans.

Inside the Americas it places 9th of 55 by population, and it accounts for 4.7% of everyone living in South America.

The Chilean peso (CLP) is used only in Chile among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Spanish is listed for 23 entries here, Chile among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to South America and Chile sits 6th of 13 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Venezuela just above and Bolivia just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Brazil is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in South America has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇻🇪 Venezuela
• 🇧🇴 Bolivia
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

Put next to every other entry on this site, Chile ranks 39th of 249 by area and 66th by population. That works out at 0.50% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.24% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Chile in the size ordering are Türkiye at 783,562 km² and Zambia at 752,612 km², against Chile's 756,102 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Chile averages 26 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 196th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

It uses the Chilean peso ($, CLP). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Chile.

The top-level domain is .cl. To phone it from abroad you dial +56. In ISO terms it is cl in two letters and CHL in three.

Santiago is the city to remember for this country.

Chile is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.