Brazil

Brazil is South America's giant in every sense. It takes up nearly half the continent, shares a border with every South American country except Chile and Ecuador, and packs 215 million people into a territory that stretches from the Amazon basin to the subtropical vineyards of the south. Portuguese is the only official language - making Brazil the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world by a factor of twenty over Portugal itself.

The cultural output is extraordinary. Brazil gave the world samba, bossa nova, Carnival, and a style of football so beautiful it has its own name - jogo bonito. Five World Cup titles is a record nobody else has matched. But the country's scale goes beyond sport and music - the Amazon Rainforest alone covers an area larger than India, and Brazil has more species of plants and animals than any other nation on Earth. From the concrete modernism of Brasilia to the favelas of Rio, from the waterfalls of Iguazu to the beaches of Fernando de Noronha, this is a country that does absolutely nothing small.