The 22 Best Hidden Gems in South America

Tucked beneath sheer cliffs on Fernando de Noronha and reachable only by a steep ladder cut into the rock (or by boat), this beach has topped "world's best beach" rankings for good reason.

Turquoise water, sea turtles visible from the shore, and a protected marine park setting mean it stays close to pristine.

The remoteness that makes it special also caps how many people can visit each day.

Water drops 979 metres off a sheer tabletop mountain in the middle of remote Venezuelan jungle, making this the tallest waterfall on Earth by a wide margin.

The fall is so tall that much of the water disperses into mist before ever reaching the pool below.

Reaching it means days of river travel by dugout canoe through Canaima National Park, so the sheer remoteness is part of what keeps the view unspoiled.

A volcanic archipelago 350km off Brazil's coast, this is regularly ranked among the world's best beaches, with clear water that reveals reef sharks and sea turtles from the shoreline.

A strict daily visitor cap and environmental tax keep the beaches close to empty even in high season.

Morro Dois Irmaos, twin volcanic peaks rising from the sea, anchor the view from almost every beach.

Strung along the Urubamba River between Cusco and Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley was the Inca empire's farming heartland and still works the same terraced hillsides.

In a day you can walk the Pisac ruins above their market, climb Ollantaytambo's fortress terraces, and see the circular agricultural bowl at Moray.

Lower and gentler than Cusco, it rewards a slower, multi-stop visit.

Peninsula Valdes juts into the South Atlantic off Argentine Patagonia and holds one of the continent's great wildlife spectacles: southern right whales calving close to shore, orcas that beach themselves hunting sea lion pups, and colonies of elephant seals and penguins.

A UNESCO site reached from Puerto Madryn, it's linked by unpaved roads between viewing points.

Sightings are seasonal, so timing matters.

Despite the name, this isn't a desert: seasonal rains fill the valleys between hundreds of square kilometres of white dunes with clear turquoise lagoons, usually June to September.

Outside that window, the dunes stretch out bone-dry and empty.

Reaching the interior means a 4x4 or a walk across shifting sand from the gateway town of Barreirinhas, but the landscape has no real equivalent on the Brazilian coast.

Tambopata protects lowland Amazon rainforest in southeastern Peru, reached by boat from Puerto Maldonado.

Jungle lodges put visitors within reach of oxbow lakes, giant otters, and one of the Amazon's largest macaw clay licks, where hundreds of parrots gather at dawn.

Guided walks and night boat rides turn up a density of wildlife hard to match elsewhere in Peru, though it costs real time and money to reach.

A vast basin of white salt crust and brine lagoons mirrors the Andes, with flamingo colonies wading in mineral-pink pools.

Otherworldly geology in the driest non-polar desert on Earth, with almost no vegetation, cracked salt crust underfoot, and only the wind and distant volcanoes for company.

Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Yasuní is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, home to more tree species in a single hectare than in all of North America, alongside jaguars, giant otters, harpy eagles and several uncontacted indigenous groups.

Jungle lodges reached by dugout canoe offer guided hikes, canopy towers and night paddles where caiman eyes reflect torchlight across blackwater lagoons.

A single, uninterrupted drop of 226 metres - about four times the height of Niagara - sends the Potaro River over a sandstone cliff into pristine Guyanese rainforest.

Unlike most waterfalls of this scale, it sits inside a protected national park with almost no development and few visitors, so the viewpoints are typically empty.

Rainbow-coloured mist rises from the base most mornings when the light is right.

The world's largest tropical wetland, a mosaic of rivers, lagoons, and gallery forest holding the highest concentration of jaguars, caimans, capybaras, and macaws anywhere in South America.

Guided boat and jeep safaris reveal wildlife far more reliably than the denser Amazon rainforest.

A labyrinth of marble caverns carved by wave action into a peninsula on Lake General Carrera, forming swirled chambers and arches in white, grey, and cobalt blue.

Accessible only by small boat, with the water's color and the marble's pattern shifting dramatically with the season and light.

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.

This 155-kilometre gorge in Argentina's arid northwest has been a travel corridor since long before the Inca, its adobe villages and banded red-and-ochre rock now UNESCO-listed.

Purmamarca sits beneath the striped Cerro de los Siete Colores, while Humahuaca and Tilcara keep colonial churches and pre-Columbian ruins within walking distance.

It rewards slow travel along Ruta 9, not a single stop.

High in the Bolivian Andes, Oruro's carnival is built around the Diablada, an elaborate devil dance performed by dancers in ornate horned masks and embroidered costumes depicting the battle between good and evil.

UNESCO recognised the event in 2001 for how deeply its folklore and costume-making traditions are woven into the city's identity.

A hypersaline lagoon in the Atacama salt flat, dense enough with dissolved minerals that swimmers float effortlessly, Dead Sea-style.

Ringed by pale salt crust and distant volcanoes, it's a strange, buoyant swim in one of the driest places on Earth, best paired with a freshwater rinse straight after.

Oscar Niemeyer's hyperboloid of sixteen concrete columns, opened in 1970, that reads from outside as a crown and from inside as a sky of blue and green glass.

Visitors descend a dark ramp and emerge under the light, a sequence Niemeyer designed deliberately.

Three bronze angels hang suspended from the roof above the nave.

A dry tropical forest turned badlands, its grey and red-clay canyons carved into labyrinths of eroded pinnacles that look more like Utah than South America.

Split into a red zone (Cuzco) and a grey zone (Los Hoyos), it's one of the best stargazing spots in Colombia thanks to an astronomical observatory built specifically to take advantage of its clear, unpolluted skies.

Walking trails wind between the formations without requiring any technical hiking experience.

Huacachina is a small palm-ringed lagoon swallowed by towering sand dunes on the edge of the Peruvian desert, a short detour off the Pan-American Highway.

The village is just a few streets and a handful of hostels around the lagoon; dune buggies and sandboarding on the surrounding dunes are the real draw.

It's a loud, high-energy stop rather than a place with much depth.

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'.

Predating the Inca by centuries, Tiwanaku was the ceremonial center of a civilization that shaped much of Andean religious and architectural tradition, including monumental gateways, sunken temples and precisely cut stonework whose engineering isn't fully understood.

Much of the site remains unexcavated, and what's been uncovered — including the carved Gateway of the Sun — shows precision that later influenced Inca sites like Machu Picchu.

Once one of the richest cities on Earth thanks to silver extracted from Cerro Rico, the mountain looming over it, Potosí's colonial wealth built ornate churches and mints that sit at odds with the mine's grim ongoing history — miners, some still teenagers, work the same tunnels using techniques barely changed in centuries.

Guided tours into the active mine are genuinely sobering, an unfiltered look at conditions few visitors ever encounter.