Chile is a country by length and a coast by width

Chile cannot be read as a compact block. It is a stretch between the Atacama and the icy south, and the width is what is left between the Andes and the Pacific. The capital sits where the people are, not where the stretch would have its middle.

Santiago de Chile lies in the central valley. North of it the country becomes desert, south of it forest, fjord and ice. The area is 756,102 square kilometres, the population 19,859,921. Argentina accompanies almost the whole Andean chain, Peru lies to the north, Bolivia to the north-east. The open side is not a border with one more state. It is the Pacific.

Desert, valley, fjord

The north is the Atacama, desert between mountains and sea, with mining and ports and very little rain. The south breaks into islands and channels and reaches Patagonia, with Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan. Between them lies the valley where Santiago stands and where most people's ordinary life takes place. The capital is the centre of the settled country. It is not the centre of the state's length. Drive north from there and you reach the mines long before you reach the border.

The state also includes islands that are not read along with the South American silhouette. Rapa Nui lies far out in the Pacific and is part of Chile, and so is the Juan Fernández archipelago. The narrow country on the continental map is an incomplete drawing of the jurisdiction. The length on the mainland remains the experience that shapes the country. North and south are politically far apart at home, because geography forces them onto one line and the width leaves no room to step aside.

The width is what the Andes and the sea leave over.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

A spine of mountains, an open coast

The Andes are the spine of the country and, at the same time, the border with Argentina. Passes do not replace width. To the east and to the west the country ends quickly, to the north and to the south it does not. That is why roads and political attention run lengthwise. Ports are the exits of an economy that has to move things out of a narrow space: ore from the desert, timber and fish from the south, wine and fruit from the valley. The shape forces the transport. The currency of this long stretch is the Chilean peso.

Bolivia borders Chile and has no Pacific coast. That is not only an accident of nature. The war that began in 1879 reordered the north in relation to Peru and Bolivia. With Bolivia, the treaty of 1904 is what underlies the line. The argument about it has not disappeared. It has been put into treaties. It belongs to the political geography of the north, together with the desert and the mines. The map of this region is a settlement of war that has become an ordinary map, with ports that do not replace, for Bolivia, the sea it lacks.

Spanish in office, other languages in the country

The official language is Spanish. Mapudungun is spoken where the Mapuche live, in the southern middle of the country. Aymara is spoken in the north, Rapanui on the island in the Pacific. For a long time the state treated the south as a frontier to be settled. That sentence is not a finished history lesson. It is a present argument about land, about forestry, and about who owns the strip between mountain and sea when older claims lie under the official map.

One official language, one currency, one capital in the valley: those are the tools with which the state treats the stretch as one country. The stretch itself stays visible. The north exports from the desert, the south lives with channels and timber, the valley with the capital and with farming. Draw Chile as an area with a centre and you draw a different country. The right drawing is a line with an open side and a spine of stone.

Chile is understood as a stretch. Santiago holds the settled middle. Desert, ice and a wide Pacific still belong to the state, including where hardly anyone would take the capital for the midpoint.