When I went to Chile I was about to undertake a cross-country move across the US. Everybody I spoke to in Santiago couldn't imagine a country where you can drive a massive distance like that and move from one major metropolis to another. At the time, I thought they were just reflecting on the fact that Chile is a country where 40% of all people live in one metro area, so there isn't another huge metro area to move to.<p>Looking at those maps, I understand their incredulity. Because of the shape of Chile, you can drive a similar distance and basically cover the entire country, rural, urban, and suburban. It's both a large country and a small one at the same time.
That is a really nice bit of information communication. Hat's off! I feel like I learned a lot and that always makes me happy.<p>One quibble. At the end it mentions why Mexico's west was of interest to the Spanish, but neglects possibly the most important part - it was where the Spanish galleons from the Philippines first landed after the grueling trip across the Pacific as detailed beautifully in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle".
My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.<p>That’s a neat collection of graphics. I’m curious how bespoke the creation process is for each graphic or if this is something everyone just does in ArcGis or similar.<p>That last graphic about the Western US being the only other candidate is interesting because the two sides of the Rockies weren’t connected by a highway until the I70 over Glenwood Canyon was completed in 1992. Before its completion, the western and eastern halves of Colorado were practically different states and it took the interstate highway project half a century to get there because the terrain was so challenging.
How is the table of dialects constructed? It's obvious if two dialects are at 1, but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I ask because the dialects spoken in Argentina and in Uruguay are practically identical, save for a few regional words. If the scale being used puts them at 0.35, then it makes me wonder about the usefulness of the scale.
The article mentions it, but I only learned recently that Bolivia did not used to be landlocked. Chile took Bolivia's coastline somewhat recently (late 1800s/early 1900s).<p>> The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a peace treaty with Chile in return for a promise of the “fullest and freest” commercial access to port.<p><a href="https://time.com/5413887/bolivia-chile-pacific/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/5413887/bolivia-chile-pacific/</a>
One of the most interesting drives in my life was Chile from the island of Chiloe to the Tatio Geysers in the Atacama. Just so many different climate zones, and all in <i>relatively</i> close proximity.<p>Chiloe and Puerto Montt were damp, cold, and fog-shrouded in Summer (Jan-Feb), very similar to parts of the coastal pacific northwest.<p>The area to its north, centered around the German-influenced town of Valdivia, was California-like. Very temperate in Summer, and very green. Lots of pastures and rivers.<p>The region becomes progressively more "Mediterranean" as you move further north; one gradually sees fewer pastures and woodlands, more vineyards, olive trees, and fruit orchards. Santiago is on the far northern end of this Mediterranean zone. The great wine regions are generally to the south and west of that capital city.<p>A few hours north of Santiago and all is desert -- but it's a fairly live desert, with all sorts of succulent plants and many types of flower. Most of the road traffic in these parts comes from copper miners and their work trucks.<p>Continue north and you're in a dry, mostly empty, moonscape. Antofagasta and Calama are nice enough towns, though, and the interesting drive from the former to the latter takes just two hours but sees you rise from sea level to +2000m. It's such a gentle and relentless slope that you barely notice it. Nothing at all like driving in the Alps.<p>I broke something in my rental car when I continued to the geysers at +4000m, but it was worth it.
Is there a name for this simple style of writing?<p>It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.
Another interesting fact about Chile is: no compass is needed. The mountains show where the East is. If the East is to your right you are facing North, otherwise you are facing South.
On the difference of Chilean Spanish to other "dialects":<p>> <i>It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.</i><p>Er... if you look at the table (<a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F856b5618-ae2c-4e01-a24a-085144fd9ab5_1456x1009.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...</a>), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like <i>those</i> have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
The Chilean Spanish portion of the article made me laugh. I'm a Spanish speaker and the Spanish I speak is closer to Mexican Spanish. I could not for the life of me understand Chileans I met in Canada. Brings back funny memories of 2001 for me.
It completely ignores the influence of the indigenous languages in the "dialect" or variation of Spanish, which is actually a much better explainer than "distance from spain".
Off topic, but that correlation matrix of "Spanish similarity" seems a bit odd. I'm from Argentina, and the spanish in Uruguay sounds practically the same. At least A LOT MORE similar than Cuban or Paraguay as it shows there.
The Atacama Desert is so dry NASA uses it to stimulate Mars.
Wikipedia also lists five (!) observatories (one under construction, to be home to the Extremely Large Telescope), including the Very Large Telescope (built), ALMA (built), and others.[1]
It's basically as close as you can get to space while being on the ground on Earth.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert#Astronomical_observatories
> Far south: too cold for another country<p>Chile has an Antarctic claim going all the way to the pole. If you consider that, it's impossible to go further south<p>If you don't, then we still just run out of land in the Continent. Note that the neighbour competition also applies to Tierra del Fuego, as we've had tensions with Argentina through history over the control of Magallanes Channel.
When it comes to dialects and accents I find Chileans to be very easy to understand. I believe Don Francisco from the famous show Sabado Gigante con Don Francisco is Chilean. <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1bado_gigante" rel="nofollow">https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1bado_gigante</a> It was aired in Univision and they ensure that the Spanish covers the Americas.
Another of my favorite shows that should be part of the article for culture sake is the Chilean show: 31 minutos. <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_minutos" rel="nofollow">https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_minutos</a> where the Spanish super clear. Maybe is because is an educational show. Anyhow great Chile article. Thanks. Go Chile! Next time. (They are out of Copa America).
Reading the title, my initial expectation was that this was going to be a Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina situation. Refreshing to read that most of the reasons here are geological/meteorological in nature.
I love how effective the article is at communicating. A digestible idea followed by visual example. Rinse and repeat. I think we could learn something from this for our documentations, or even Jira comments.
"""<p>Peru & Bolivia went to war with Chile for that region, but they lost in the War of the Pacific.<p>Why fight? Natural resources: guano and saltpeter.<p>Back then, guano was the world’s main fertilizer (and this area had most of the world's guano, thanks to the climate).<p>"""<p>That fertilizer produced iconic advertising in mid XX Century Portugal and Spain:
<a href="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR22G9/nitrato-de-chile-advertising-poster-obidos-portugal-AR22G9.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR22G9/nitrato-de-chile-advertisin...</a>
I don't know but a Peruvian once told me that when God created South America he gave the Peruvians the titties from lake Titicaca and Bolivia got the shit left over.<p>I never quite figured out what it meant.
Absolutely amazing example of data journalism. Perhaps not all maps are created by the author originally, but such articles show very well how text paired with maps can greatly enhance the overall amount of knowledge transferred. ESRI have some similar articles in their Living Atlas using maps from it also. Not sure whether there is another like... easy/standard alternative, but the potential for such articles is huge. It is very possible that each serious article can benefit from some maps.
This article is awesome. I've always wondered why Chile is that shape and I didn't know about the Chilean dialect of Spanish being so far off from the others. Super cool.
From the post: "You see how red Chilean Spanish is? It means it’s quite different. In the beginning of Grad School, I could understand all my Hispanic classmates, but I had a hard time understanding the Chileans!"<p>As a native Spanish speaker, I find this quite interesting. For me, Chileans are within the category of "easy to understand" while I might struggle a bit understanding some accents that the article qualifies as easy or normal.
It's important to note that, in some interpretations, it could be much, much longer:<p><a href="https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-snack-rack/" rel="nofollow">https://craigcalcaterra.com/blog/long-chile-ohio2-and-the-sn...</a>
I was in Santiago for a month last year. It's a beautiful city and people are very friendly. I could not visit the desert in the north, but have heard wonderful stories about it. I really wish I am able to go there again.<p>Also, I had no idea Chile is sooo long.
> But in this part of the world, the mountain chains start from deep under the sea, which generates archipelagos rather than a continental sliver.<p>Technically New Zealand is the exposed portion of a continental sliver.
Am I misreading this or is that "How close is Spanish from Different Countries" graphic kind of jank? There's intersecting lines that are missing, like Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic.
Cool article. TIL I learned that Atacama has flower blooms.<p>I miss the Inca though. Talking about Chile without mentioning the Inca Empire is like talking about Italy without mentioning the Roman Empire.
From the same author, somehow related to the topics and maybe a bit more interesting : https:/unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-rain-shadow-effect
Hmmm. From my travels through Latin America, I would rate Colombian accents as by far the easiest to understand. Without exception, everyone spoke with clear diction and enunciation. I would definitely not rate it "very hard" - that would be reserved for the Honduran accent, which I found incomprehensible even spoken s-l-o-w-l-y.<p>Looks like they're rating "difficulty" as "difference from Spanish in Spain". Considering that Spaniards only represent about 10% of the total Spanish-speaking population, I'm not sure that's fair.
many nation shapes don't make any sense. add in the wildly disconnected/schizophrenic sovereign territory of some countries (US and Russia among exemplars) and I've learned one must simply turn one's brain off when analyzing them. Its a circus.
Originally posted on X: <a href="https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1807380049605091537" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1807380049605091537</a>
When I was a kid, I had a fascination with maps. Among all the shapes and borders, one country always stood out to me: Chile. It seemed to me like a magical land that was different from all the others.