South America is fourth largest continent in the world, with an area of 17.84 million square kilometers. It is mostly situated in the Western and Southern Hemispheres, but a very small part is positioned in the Northern Hemisphere.
As of 2011, the population of South America is at 387.5 million, ranking fifth after Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America.

South America is home to many world wonders. It is where Venezuela’s Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world, is located. It is 979 meters high and has a drop that measures 807 meters.

The continent is also where we can find the world’s largest river in terms of volume. The Amazon River is accounted for 20% of the total river flow in the world, with an average discharge of 209,000 cubic meters per second. It contains the world’s largest drainage basin, known as the Amazon Basin, which measures more than 7 million square kilometers. It is also where the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon jungle, is found.

The Andes, the world’s longest mountain range, extends 7,000 kilometers along the western South American coast, with a width that ranges between 200 and 700 kilometers, and an average height of 4 kilometers.

The languages spoken in South America are products of the European colonizations that took place in the past. Portuguese and Spanish are the languages with the most number of speakers in the region.

Its borders are the Atlantic Ocean to the north and east, Pacific Ocean to the west, and the Caribbean Sea and the North America to the northwest. It is made up of 12 independent countries: Venezuela, Uruguay, Suriname, Peru, Paraguay, Guyana, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina; and the United Kingdom’s Falkland Islands, and France’s French Guiana.