Countries in South America: All 12, With Capitals

South America has 12 sovereign countries, and every one of them is a member state of the United Nations: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. Here they are with their capital cities, ordered from the most populous to the least.

Two things in that table need a footnote. Bolivia is the one country with two defensible answers: Article 6 of its constitution says in a single line that Sucre is the capital, while La Paz is the seat of government and the city most references, the World Bank among them, print as the capital. And the figures are World Bank data — populations estimated for 2025, areas given as surface area. Other reference works publish slightly different areas, so treat the last column as the right size rather than the last square kilometre.

Size order and population order are not the same list, which is where quick summaries usually go wrong. By area the top five run Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia; by population they run Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela. Argentina is the second-largest country and the third most populous; Bolivia is fifth by area and eighth by people; Uruguay is the second-smallest by area but has four times the population of Guyana, which is bigger. Brazil leads both and not narrowly — about 48% of the land of the twelve, and 212.8 million of their roughly 438 million people.

If what you actually need is the map rather than the list, the quiz above names each country and asks you to click it. The sections below settle the 12-versus-13-versus-14 argument, give a map-anchored way to learn the shapes, and separate the pairs that cost everyone points.

South America has 12 sovereign countries, and that list is not really in doubt: all twelve sit on the United Nations roll of 193 member states, Guyana since 20 September 1966 and Suriname since 4 December 1975 — the two most recent arrivals. The higher numbers you'll see quoted come from counting territories that sit on the continent but are governed from elsewhere: add French Guiana and you get 13, add the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) and you get 14. All three counts appear on reputable-looking sites, which is why the question keeps getting asked.

Here is the whole picture in one table.

The two entries doing all the work are worth a line each, because neither is a borderline case once you look at who governs it.

The genuinely arguable cases sit at the edges. Trinidad and Tobago lies on the South American continental shelf, just off Venezuela, but is politically and culturally counted as Caribbean. Panama occupies the isthmus that physically joins the two continents and is counted as North America. Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire lie a few dozen kilometres off the Venezuelan coast but belong to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are a British Overseas Territory in the far South Atlantic, usually grouped with Antarctica rather than the continent.

This quiz uses the 12-country rule: sovereign states only. It's the count used by the UN membership list and by most school curricula, and it's the only rule where every answer is a country in the ordinary sense of the word. French Guiana appears on the map — you can see it in the northeast corner — but you are never asked to click it as a country.

Almost every mnemonic you'll find for this is an acrostic — a sentence whose initials spell out the twelve names in some fixed order. Acrostics work for recall lists: name the countries, no map required. They are close to useless for a click-the-map quiz, because the quiz never asks you for the twelfth name. It hands you a name and asks where it is. A sentence that teaches sequence teaches you nothing about position, and the moment the quiz randomises the order the sentence stops helping at all.

Learn the map spatially instead, in five blocks, each one defined by its relationship to the block before it. Start with Brazil. It is roughly 47% of the continent's land area and it borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador, which means Brazil is not one shape among twelve — it is the frame everything else hangs on. Fill it in first and eleven countries become edges around a known centre.

Block two is the west coast pair: Chile, the thin ribbon pinned between the Andes and the Pacific, and Argentina, the broad wedge on its eastern side running down to the southern tip. Block three walks the Pacific coast north from Chile — Peru, then Ecuador, then Colombia at the corner. Block four turns east along the Caribbean and Atlantic rim: Venezuela first, then the three narrow slivers of the northeast in order, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana. Block five is the three that trip everyone: Bolivia and Paraguay, both landlocked and stacked one above the other in the interior, and Uruguay, the small coastal one tucked between Brazil and Argentina on the Atlantic.

Drill the blocks, not the list. Take the quiz, then ask yourself which block you hesitated on rather than which country — the hesitation almost always clusters. Your best score is saved in your browser, so a run two days later tells you honestly whether a block has stuck or whether you were guessing from process of elimination.

The three Guianas are where most runs fall apart, partly because they are small and partly because the names blur. Take them west to east, in alphabetical order, which happens to be the same as their order on the map. Guyana is westernmost, bordering Venezuela, and is the former British colony — the only country in South America with English as its official language. Suriname is in the middle, the former Dutch colony, where the official language is still Dutch and which is the smallest sovereign state on the continent. French Guiana is easternmost and is not a country at all: it is part of France, and it's where the European Space Agency launches from, at the Kourou spaceport. If you can remember that the alphabet runs left to right here, you have all three.

Uruguay and Paraguay get swapped constantly because the names differ by three letters. The distinguishing tell has nothing to do with spelling: Uruguay is coastal, sitting on the Atlantic directly below Brazil with Montevideo on the estuary of the Río de la Plata. Paraguay is landlocked and well inland, north of Argentina. Coast versus no coast settles it every time.

Bolivia and Paraguay are the other classic swap, and here the shared property is the trap — they are the continent's only two landlocked countries, so "the landlocked one" is ambiguous. Separate them vertically: Bolivia is the larger, higher, more northern of the two, wrapped around the Andes and touching Peru and Chile; Paraguay is the smaller one directly south of it, touching Argentina. Bolivia is the one with La Paz and Lake Titicaca; Paraguay is the one that is entirely lowland.

Two more pairs cost time rather than points. Ecuador and Peru sit next to each other on the Pacific coast, but Ecuador is small and straddles the equator it's named after, while Peru is several times its size and runs south of it. Colombia and Venezuela are the two northern giants: Colombia is the western one, and it is the only South American country with coastline on both the Pacific and the Caribbean. If the country you're looking at touches the Pacific, it isn't Venezuela.

One habit is worth more than all of these tells combined: when you're unsure, place the ones you're certain about first. Every confident click removes a shape from the pool, and the Guianas in particular become trivial once Venezuela and Brazil are down.

South America usually turns up twice in a school career. Continents and the basic political map are typically introduced in the upper elementary years, roughly grades 3 to 5, where the goal is simply naming and locating. World regions come back around grades 6 to 7 in most middle-school geography sequences, where the same map is revisited with physical geography, climate and history layered on top. The quiz suits both passes: for the younger group it's the whole lesson objective, for the older group it's the five-minute check that clears the way to the interesting material.

Practically, it works best in three formats. As a bell-ringer, put it on the board as students arrive and let the class call out placements — the twelve-country map is short enough to finish before the bell settles. As a timed round, have everyone run it individually and record only their own time, repeating on Friday; because the best score is stored in the browser on each device, students compete against their own Monday result rather than against each other, which keeps the students who need the practice most from opting out. As a warm-up before content, run it once cold, then teach the material in the sections above, then run it again — the improvement in a single lesson is usually large enough to be visibly motivating.

For an offline follow-up, the standard move is a blank outline map and coloured pencils: have students fill in the twelve countries from memory, then check against the quiz. Ask them to shade the two landlocked countries and the three Guianas in different colours — those are the five that account for most errors, and colouring them separately forces the distinction the quiz is testing.

One note on what this tool is and isn't: it's free, it runs entirely in the browser, and it needs no account or class code, which means you can put the link in a slide deck or a sub plan without anyone having to sign up for anything. It doesn't track students, doesn't report scores to you. For the paper follow-up, the two buttons under the map print a blank version and a numbered answer key.

Four decisions explain nearly every strange shape on this map, and knowing them makes the shapes far easier to hold in memory — an outline you understand is one you can reconstruct rather than merely recall.

1494: the Treaty of Tordesillas. Two years after Columbus's first voyage, Spain and Portugal divided the unexplored world along a meridian in the Atlantic, with everything east of the line falling to Portugal. The line clipped only the eastern bulge of what is now Brazil — but Portuguese settlers, bandeirantes and missionaries pushed west across it for two centuries, and by the Treaty of Madrid in 1750 the two crowns effectively recognised what had happened on the ground. That is why one country covers roughly 47% of the continent while eleven Spanish- and other-language states share the rest, and why Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas. Every time you place Brazil first, you are using a line drawn in 1494.

1830: the breakup of Gran Colombia. After independence from Spain, Simón Bolívar's Gran Colombia united the territory of today's Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama into a single republic. It lasted about a decade. Regional rivalries, the sheer difficulty of governing across the Andes, and the collapse of Bolívar's authority pulled it apart in 1830, the year he died: Venezuela and Ecuador separated, and the remainder became New Granada and eventually Colombia. That is why the northwest is three medium-sized countries with a shared history rather than one large one — and why their borders look like administrative divisions, which is exactly what they were.

1879–1884: the War of the Pacific. Chile fought Bolivia and Peru over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert and won. Bolivia lost its entire coastal department, the Litoral, including the port of Antofagasta, and has been landlocked ever since; Peru lost Tarapacá under the 1883 Treaty of Ancón. Chile gained the northern desert strip that turned it into a country 4,300 km long and rarely more than 180 km wide. Two of the map's oddest features — the world's thinnest-looking country and a landlocked Bolivia that still maintains a navy on Lake Titicaca in memory of the coast it lost — come from the same five-year war.

The Dutch, British and French Guianas. The northeast corner is three narrow slivers because it was the one stretch of the continent Spain and Portugal never effectively settled. Dutch, English and French traders established plantation colonies there in the 17th century, and the boundaries between them were negotiated between European powers, not drawn by local states. British Guiana became Guyana in 1966, Dutch Guiana became Suriname in 1975, and French Guiana never left France at all — it became a full overseas department in 1946 and remains French and EU territory today. Three colonial powers, three slivers, one of them still administered from Paris.

Each country below gets a single hook. These aren't trivia for its own sake — a fact attached to a shape is a retrieval cue, and a country you know something specific about is one you'll find on the map faster than one that's just a name.

Notice how many of these facts are the answer to a superlative question — largest, smallest, longest, highest, tallest. That's deliberate. Superlatives are the easiest facts to retrieve under time pressure, and four of the twelve countries here are the answer to a "which is the most..." question, which means four of your twelve clicks can come from a completely different memory route than shape recognition.

Two entries do double duty as tie-breakers. "Only English-speaking" separates Guyana from Suriname the instant you're unsure which sliver is which, and "the other landlocked one" is the fastest way to stop yourself clicking Bolivia when the quiz asked for Paraguay.