Why is Chile such a strange shape?

Because the Andes fixed one edge and the Pacific the other. Chile is about 4,300 kilometres long and averages 180 wide - if you laid it over Europe it would run from Norway to North Africa, and you can drive across it in a couple of hours almost anywhere.

That geometry gives it nearly every climate on Earth in one country: the Atacama in the north is the driest place outside the poles, the middle is Mediterranean and grows the wine, the south is temperate rainforest and fjords, and the far south is subantarctic. It also owns Easter Island, 3,500 kilometres out into the Pacific, which extends the shape absurdly.

The length is also a hazard. Chile sits on the boundary where the Nazca plate dives under South America, which produces the Andes and the largest earthquake ever recorded - magnitude 9.5 in 1960, which sent a tsunami across the Pacific that killed people in Japan a day later. The country now has among the strictest building codes in the world, which is why its 8.8 quake in 2010 killed a few hundred while Haiti's 7.0 that same year killed well over a hundred thousand.