What is the largest country in South America?

Brazil, which covers about half the continent and borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador. It is also the only Portuguese-speaking one, because of a line drawn on a map in 1494 - the Treaty of Tordesillas split the undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal along a meridian, and the eastern bulge of South America happened to fall on Portugal's side six years before any European reached it.

It is the only country to have hosted an empire in the Americas. When Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807 the entire royal court fled to Rio de Janeiro - so for over a decade a European kingdom was governed from South America, and when the king went home his son declared independence and became emperor of Brazil. It remained a monarchy until 1889, which is why the transition was comparatively bloodless and why the country did not fragment the way Spanish America did.

It was also the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, and received more enslaved Africans than anywhere else in the hemisphere by a wide margin - something like forty per cent of the entire transatlantic trade. That is the single largest fact about Brazilian demography, culture and inequality, and it is why the country has the largest population of African descent outside Africa.