The 13 Best City Experiences in South America

Rio de Janeiro's Carnival is the largest and most famous in the world, headlined by Sambadrome parades where the city's top samba schools compete through the night in elaborate feathered costumes and floats years in the making.

Beyond the Sambadrome, hundreds of free street parties called blocos take over neighbourhoods for days, open to anyone who wants to dance along.

Cusco was the capital of the Inca Empire, and the history still shows: Inca stonework underpins colonial churches along cobbled streets radiating from Plaza de Armas.

It's a living Andean city of nearly half a million people, not a museum piece, with markets and restaurants layered over centuries of rebuilding.

Most visitors use it as a base before Machu Picchu, but it easily holds its own for two or three days.

A two-stage cable car, the bondinho, carries visitors from Praia Vermelha up over the forested Morro da Urca to the bare granite summit of Pão de Açúcar, 396 metres above Guanabara Bay.

From the top, Rio unfolds in full: Copacabana's curve, Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado, and the bay's scattering of islands.

It's one stop, one ride, and one of the most complete views of the city available anywhere.

Buenos Aires pairs wide, Parisian-style boulevards with the pulse of a Latin American capital: tango danced in San Telmo squares, steak houses running late into the night, and the pink Casa Rosada overlooking Plaza de Mayo.

Neighborhoods vary sharply, from elegant Recoleta's cafes and cemetery to La Boca's brightly painted tenements.

It's a walkable city built for lingering, not checklist sightseeing.

Launched in 1985 with what was then the largest concert audience ever assembled, Rock in Rio built a purpose-designed City of Rock venue, spread across multiple stages, a Ferris wheel, and a full mock street of bars and food stalls.

The lineup leans toward major international rock and pop headliners, and the festival has since spread to spin-off editions in Lisbon and Madrid.

Colombia's biggest carnival and, by most measures, the second-largest in the world after Rio, Barranquilla's four-day celebration blends African, Indigenous and Spanish traditions into parades of cumbia dancers and marimonda figures with their signature long-nosed masks.

UNESCO recognised it in 2003 for how intact its folkloric traditions remain.

Quito's historic center was the first UNESCO World Heritage Site ever designated, and remains the largest, best-preserved colonial-era old town in Latin America.

Baroque churches like La Compañía de Jesús drip with gold leaf inside plain stone exteriors, while plazas and narrow streets climb the Andean foothills at over 2,800 meters of altitude.

The Basílica del Voto Nacional's towers offer views across the whole old town.

Chile's main historic port climbs steep hills above the Pacific, linked by century-old funiculars and dense with painted houses and street art.

UNESCO listed the old quarter for its unplanned layout, and wandering the stairways of Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, plus Pablo Neruda's clifftop house La Sebastiana, is the main activity.

Parts of the city have visibly declined, and the port is still working, not polished.

The world's highest administrative capital spills down a canyon at over 3,600 meters, with the wealthier neighborhoods lower in the bowl and poorer areas climbing toward the thin air of the rim — a layout the city's cable-car network, the world's largest urban Teleférico system, makes spectacularly visible from above.

The Witches' Market sells traditional Andean remedies alongside colonial-era churches and a lively street-food scene.

Ecuador's third-largest city is also its most polished colonial one, with blue-domed cathedrals, riverside promenades along the Tomebamba, and a compact historic core awarded UNESCO status for its well-preserved Spanish colonial grid.

It's also the traditional home of the (misleadingly named) Panama hat, and workshops around the city still weave them by hand.

Chile's capital sits in a wide valley with the snow-capped Andes rising directly behind its skyline, a backdrop few capitals can match on a clear day.

The colonial core around Plaza de Armas, the funicular up Cerro San Cristóbal, and the restaurants of Bellavista give it a couple of solid days' worth of things to do.

Most travellers treat it as a stopover before Atacama or Patagonia rather than a destination itself.

Bolivia's constitutional capital is a UNESCO-listed city of whitewashed colonial buildings under a strict preservation code, giving it a cleaner, more uniform look than most Bolivian cities.

Its plazas, churches and the Casa de la Libertad — where Bolivia's independence was declared — reflect its history, while nearby Cal Orck'o holds one of the world's largest dinosaur-footprint collections, on a nearly vertical limestone wall.

On the Belem waterfront where the Amazon meets the Guajara Bay, Ver-o-Peso has traded since the 17th century and remains South America's largest open-air market, its stalls piled with Amazonian fruit few outsiders can name, medicinal herbs, and fish hauled off boats at the adjoining cast-iron fish market pavilion.

The name means 'see the weight'.