Chile: The Country Shaped Like a Sword Down the Side of a Continent
🌐 Translate:
Chile is 4,270 kilometres long and averages 177 kilometres wide — a strip of land running from the driest desert on earth to some of the most dramatic fjords and glaciers on the planet. The Atacama Desert in the north is so dry that some weather stations have never recorded rainfall. The Patagonian region in the south contains ice fields second only to Antarctica. Between these extremes: the Central Valley, where most Chileans live and where some of the world's best wine is grown.
Chilean wine has gone from regional curiosity to global force in four decades. The Central Valley's combination of dry summers, cool nights, and Andean meltwater irrigation produces grapes with concentrated flavour and controlled sugar. Carménère — a grape variety thought extinct in France after phylloxera destroyed European vineyards in the 19th century — was discovered growing throughout Chile in 1994. It had been there all along, mislabelled as Merlot. Chile now produces the world's only significant Carménère.
Easter Island — Rapa Nui — is Chilean territory, 3,700 kilometres off the coast in the Pacific Ocean, and one of the most remote inhabited places on earth. The moai — the giant stone heads that stand along the island's coast facing inland, watching over their communities — were carved by the Rapa Nui people between the 13th and 16th centuries. Nearly a thousand of them survive. How they were transported and erected using only the materials available on a small island is still debated. That they exist at all is extraordinary.
