Largest caves
Gruta Casa de Pedra in Brazil has the largest cave mouth in the world – it is higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza. But the largest cave chamber in the world is larger still.
Category: South America
Orinoco flow
By discharge volume, the Amazon and the Orinoco are the largest and fourth largest rivers in the world. The Casiquiare River in Venezuela connects them.
Farthest mountain
The summit of Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador, is two kilometres farther from the Earth’s centre than Mount Everest.
January weather
According to Las Cabañuelas lore, you can predict the weather for the whole year based on the weather of each day in January.
Alligator centaur
El Hombre Caimán is a popular Colombian myth about a man who is half man, half alligator – the result of an accident while peeping on bathing women.
The Pan-American gap
You can drive from northern Alaska all the way to Tierra Del Fuego in southern Argentina… except for a 106km gap in the road between the two.
The town of no appendices
Before you move into Villa Las Estrellas you must have your appendix removed.
The Amazon, reversed
The rise of the Andes reversed the direction of the Amazon River’s flow from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Hands of Perón
In 1987 the tomb of Argentinian president Juan Perón was broken into and his hands dismembered and stolen. A ransom note was received but never paid, and the hands were never seen again.
Guarana and bullet ants
What do bullet ants and guarana have in common? The Sateré-Mawé people of Brazil.
The Apostles of Linnaeus
Between 1746 and 1792, seventeen students of Carl Linnaeus set out across the globe to collect plant and animal samples for his new taxonomy. Seven of these apostles died on the trip, and one would betray Linnaeus.
Walking the Imperial Andes
The 40,000km-long Incan road system connected 12 million people, but it also supplied the Incan army with food from thousands of storage depots spread across the whole network.
A thousand flavours
The Heladería Coromoto ice cream parlour in Merida, Venezuela offers nearly a thousand different flavours of ice cream, including avocado, garlic, onion, sweetcorn, and crab.
Black diamond mystery
Where do black diamonds come from? We don’t actually know.
Blackbirding
In 1862, between a third and half of the entire population of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) were kidnapped by Peruvian slavers.
Skyscraper squatting
The Centro Financiero Confinanzas skyscraper was unfinished at the time of the 1994 Venezuelan banking crisis. In 2007, squatters moved in.