Chile

Chile is a narrow strip more than four thousand kilometres long wedged between the Andes and the Pacific, and that shape turns it into a biogeographical island: the desert to the north, the cordillera to the east and the ocean to the west have isolated its flora and fauna, producing very high endemism. In the north, the Atacama is the driest desert on the planet, with areas where no rain has been recorded in decades. The centre has a Mediterranean climate and is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. To the south lies the Valdivian rainforest, a temperate wet woodland with thousand-year-old alerce trees, and beyond that the fjords, icefields and Patagonia. The Humboldt Current brings a cold and extraordinarily productive sea.