Chile stretches some 4,300 kilometres down the Pacific coast of South America, between the Andes and the sea. The Atacama, the driest desert on Earth, gives way to the fertile Central Valley around Santiago, the lakes, volcanoes and forests of the south and the fjords, glaciers and steppes of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego; far out in the Pacific lies Rapa Nui, Easter Island. Hunter-gatherers camped at Monte Verde, near Puerto Montt, some 14,500 years ago, a date widely accepted though still debated; later the Chinchorro fishers of the Arica coast made the world's oldest artificial mummies, and Atacameño, Diaguita and Mapuche farmers, canoe peoples of the southern channels and Polynesian voyagers made the land their own.

Topa Inca's armies brought northern and central Chile into the Inca Empire in the 1470s, and in 1520 Magellan sailed through the strait that bears his name. Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago in 1541, but the Mapuche resisted in the long Arauco War, killing Valdivia at Tucapel in 1553 and, after their victory at Curalaba in 1598, destroying every Spanish city south of the Biobío. For two centuries Chile was a frontier captaincy of haciendas, forts and parliaments with the Mapuche. On 18 September 1810 Santiago set up its own junta, and after the Spanish reconquest, San Martín and O'Higgins's victories at Chacabuco in 1817 and Maipú in 1818 secured independence.

Diego Portales and the Constitution of 1833 built an ordered republic that defeated the Peru-Bolivian Confederation and settled the far south. Liberal governments occupied Araucanía, won the nitrate provinces in the War of the Pacific and annexed Easter Island, until the civil war of 1891 ushered in a Parliamentary Republic. The Constitution of 1925 opened half a century of mass politics, industrialisation and reform that ended when the armed forces overthrew Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, whose killings, disappearances and torture were documented by the Rettig and Valech reports, remade the economy until the No vote of 1988. Since 1990 democratic governments have combined growth with gradual reform; the social outburst of 2019 led to two rejected constitutional drafts, and in March 2026 José Antonio Kast took office as president.

Explore the ten ages below through selected events from the timeline.