Every Day Is Special: September 19 – Armed Forces Day in Chile

September 19 – Armed Forces Day in Chile

Posted on September 19, 2017

Yesterday was Chile's Independence Day.

Today is Day #2 of the national holiday, with a military parade and air displays in the capital city, Santiago, and in some other cities as well.

This super long-and-skinny South American country has some amazing features. Like these:

According to the Guinness Book of Records, Chile has the largest swimming pool. Here are the numbers for the saltwater pool:

Length: 1,000 yards (about 1,000 m)

Area: 20 acres

Maximum depth: 115 feet!!!

Volume: 66 million gallons

Another world record holder: the Atacama Desert is the driest non-polar desert in the world. There are parts of the desert that haven't seen rain in - get this! - over 400 years! (The desert as a whole receives an average of 15 mm, or about 0.6 inches, of precipitation per year.)

Chile has a lot of mountains - the Andes mountain range, which dominates South America. As a matter of fact, 80% of the country is mountainous!

One of Chile's mountains, the Ojos del Salado, is the highest active volcano in the world. And Chile has a lot of active volcanoes - about 500 of them! Yikes!

The Pacific islands that belong to Chile are volcanic. They formed from magma bubbling up from three different hotspots. Hotspots tend to create chains of islands, but in the case of some of the hotspots off the coast of Chile, underwater ridges were formed with only an occasional island rising high enough from the seafloor to reach the surface and become an island.