Brazil

The Amazon basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The Amazon drainage basin covers an area of about 7,000,000 km (2,700,000 sq mi), or about 35.5 percent of the South American continent. It is located in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela, as well as the territory of French Guiana.

Most of the basin is covered by the Amazon rainforest, also known as Amazonia. With a 6 million km (2.3 million sq mi) area of dense tropical forest, it is the largest rainforest in the world.

The Amazon River (US: /ˈæməzɒn/; Portuguese: rio Amazonas, Spanish: río Amazonas) in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, and the longest or second-longest river system in the world, a title which is disputed with the Nile.

The headwaters of the Apurímac River on Nevado Mismi had been considered, for nearly a century, the Amazon basin's most distant source until a 2014 study found it to be the headwaters of the Mantaro River on the Cordillera Rumi Cruz in Peru. The Mantaro and Apurímac rivers join, and with other tributaries form the Ucayali River, which in turn meets the Marañón River upstream of Iquitos, Peru, forming what countries other than Brazil consider to be the main stem of the Amazon. Brazilians call this section the Solimões River above its confluence with the Rio Negro forming what Brazilians call the Amazon at the Meeting of Waters (Portuguese: Encontro das Águas) at Manaus, the largest city on the river.

Below is a list of countries and dependencies in South America by area. Brazil is the largest country in South America while Suriname is the smallest.

Panama is not regarded as a transcontinental country but the country is sometimes included in South America due to being part of Colombia prior to its secession in 1903. The island of Trinidad is sometimes included in South America, which then makes Trinidad and Tobago a transcontinental country.

The Río de la Plata basin (Spanish: Cuenca del Plata, Portuguese: Bacia do Prata), more often called the River Plate basin in scholarly writings, sometimes called the Platine basin or Platine region, is the 3,170,000-square-kilometre (1,220,000 sq mi) hydrographical area in South America that drains to the Río de la Plata. It includes areas of southeastern Bolivia, southern and central Brazil, the entire country of Paraguay, most of Uruguay, and northern Argentina. Making up about one fourth of the continent's surface, it is the second largest drainage basin in South America (after the Amazon basin) and one of the largest in the world.

The main rivers of the La Plata basin are the Paraná River, the Paraguay River (the Paraná's main tributary), and the Uruguay River.

Tropical rainforests are dense and warm rainforests with high rainfall typically found between 10° north and south of the Equator. They are a subset of the tropical forest biome that occurs roughly within the 28° latitudes (in the torrid zone between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn). Tropical rainforests are a type of tropical moist broadleaf forest, that includes the more extensive seasonal tropical forests. True rainforests usually occur in tropical rainforest climates where no dry season occurs; all months have an average precipitation of at least 60 mm (2.4 in). Seasonal tropical forests with tropical monsoon or savanna climates are sometimes included in the broader definition.

Tropical rainforests ecosystems are distinguished by their consistent, high temperatures, exceeding 18 °C (64 °F) monthly, and substantial annual rainfall. The abundant rainfall results in nutrient-poor, leached soils, which profoundly affect the flora and fauna adapted to these conditions. These rainforests are renowned for their significant biodiversity. They are home to 40–75% of all species globally, including half of the world's animal and plant species, and two-thirds of all flowering plant species. Their dense insect population and variety of trees and higher plants are notable. Described as the "world's largest pharmacy", over a quarter of natural medicines have been discovered in them. However, tropical rainforests are threatened by human activities, such as logging and agricultural expansion, leading to habitat fragmentation and loss.

A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical, political, technical or architectural importance. Examples of monuments include statues, (war) memorials, historical buildings, archaeological sites, and cultural assets. If there is a public interest in its preservation, a monument can for example be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States is a treaty signed at Montevideo, Uruguay, on December 26, 1933, during the Seventh International Conference of American States. At the conference, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared the Good Neighbor Policy, which opposed U.S. armed intervention in inter-American affairs. The convention was signed by 19 states. The acceptance of Brazil, Peru and the United States as signatories was subject to minor reservations.

The convention became operative on December 26, 1934. It was registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series on January 8, 1936.

Extractivism is the removal of natural resources particularly for export with minimal processing. This economic model is common throughout the Global South and the Arctic region, but also happens in some sacrifice zones in the Global North in European extractivism. The concept was coined in Portuguese as "extractivismo" in 1996 to describe the for-profit exploitation of forest resources in Brazil.

Many actors are involved in the process of extractivism. These mainly include transnational corporations (TNCs) as the main players, but are not limited to them, because they also include the government and some (chiefly economic) community members. Trends have demonstrated that countries do not often extract their own resources; extraction is often led from abroad. Extractivism is controversial because it exists at the intersection where economic growth and environmental protection meet. This intersection is known as the green economy. Extractivism has evolved in the wake of neo-liberal economic transitions to become a potential avenue for development to occur. This development occurs through stabilizing growth rates and increasing direct foreign investment.

A megacity is a very large city, typically with a population of more than 10 million people. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) in its "World Urbanization Prospects" report defines megacities as urban agglomerations with over 10 million inhabitants. A University of Bonn report holds that they are "usually defined as metropolitan areas with a total population of 10 million or more people". Elsewhere in other sources, from five to eight million is considered the minimum threshold, along with a population density of at least 2,000 per square kilometre. The terms conurbation, metropolis, and metroplex are also applied to the latter.

The total number of megacities in the world varies between different sources and their publication dates. The world had 32 according to EU Global Human Settlement Layer (in 2024), 33 according to UN DESA (in 2025), 39 according to the OECD, 42 according to Demographia (in 2025), and 45 according to CityPopulation.de (in 2023). The later two add 13 additional cities that are calculated outside the range otherwise. In total, at most 53 unique places are mentioned as megacities across these sources, although some of these are just agglomerated differently between them. A good percentage of these urban agglomerations are in China and India. The other three-to-five countries with more than one megacity are Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, and the United States. African megacities are present in Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa; European megacities are present in France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey (also in Asia); megacities can be found in Latin America in the countries of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina.

São Paulo (/ˌsaʊ ˈpaʊloʊ/; Portuguese: [sɐ̃w ˈpawlu] ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the capital city of the state of São Paulo, as well as the most populous city in Brazil and in the Americas. Listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) as an alpha global city, it exerts substantial international influence in commerce, finance, arts, and entertainment. It is the largest urban area by population outside Asia and the most populous Portuguese-speaking city in the world. The city's name honors Paul the Apostle and people from the city are known as paulistanos. The city's Latin motto is Non ducor, duco, which translates as "I am not led, I lead".

Founded in 1554 by Jesuit priests, the city was the center of the bandeirantes settlers during Colonial Brazil, but it became a relevant economic force only during the Brazilian coffee cycle in the mid-19th century and later consolidated its role as the main national economic hub with industrialization in Brazil in the 20th century, which made the city a cosmopolitan melting pot, home to the largest Arab, Italian, and Japanese diasporas in the world, with ethnic neighborhoods like Bixiga, Bom Retiro, and Liberdade, and people from more than 200 other countries. The city's metropolitan area, Greater São Paulo, is home to more than 20 million inhabitants and ranks as the most populous in Brazil and one of the most populous in the world. The process of conurbation between the metropolitan areas around Greater São Paulo also created the São Paulo Macrometropolis, the first megalopolis in the Southern Hemisphere, with more than 30 million inhabitants.