February 27, 2010
The national flower is the copihue. The Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral described it this way: "The climber betrays the grumpy austral forest; she revives it and practically makes it speak. The acrobat of the oaks and the dancer of the whitewoods harries its nursemaid-trees with the lasso of flaming fireworks."
The driest desert in the world, Atacama Desert - or Norte Grande - is in the northern half of Chile.
The monetary system of Chile is single-unit based, with the unit of Chilean money being called the Peso. The names and relative values of the coins depicted above are, from left to right:
* One Peso - (1 Peso)
* Five Pesos - (5 Pesos)
* Ten Pesos - (10 Pesos)
* Fifty Pesos - (50 Pesos)
* One Hundred Pesos - (100 Pesos)
* Five Hundred Pesos - (500 Pesos)
The ocean waters are very cold along the entire coast because of the Humboldt Current, which flows north from Antarctica.
The largest swimming pool in the world is in Chile. It is more than 1,000 yards long, covers 20 acres, has a 115ft deep end and holds 66 million gallons of water.
Easter Island is in the Chile North Santiago Mission, and is more than 2,300 miles from the Chilean mainland.
At the southernmost tip of Chile, there are glaciers as much as a million years old. Pieces of these glaciers break off and become icebergs. Icebergs here are a deep, clear blue, which indicates that they are very old and very compressed. Nearly all the oxygen has been squeezed out of them.
10% of the worlds volcanos are in Chile; 1,080 - 50 of them active.
The southern part of of Chile is made up of thousands of little islands. One of these islands is named Robinson Crusoe, after the novel by Daniel Defoe. Defoe based the story on the experiences of a seaman (Alexander Selkirk) marooned on that very Chilean island in 1704. He lived there for 4 years before being rescued by an English Pirate Ship.
