The Greatest Engineering Wonders in South America
12 places in 6 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the greatest engineering wonders in South America are Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Chile), Sugarloaf Cable Car (Brazil) and Juscelino Kubitschek bridge (Brazil). The list covers 12 engineering wonders in 6 countries. Argentina has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
South America sets engineers extreme problems: the Andes rise to more than six thousand metres, the Atacama is the driest non-polar desert on Earth, and great cities lie wedged between mountains and sea. The answers range from Inca fibre bridges to railways that climb into thin air, and from cable cars over tropical bays to telescopes placed where the sky is clearest. Many of them only make sense because of the landscape they conquer.
The Atacama turned its dryness into an asset. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array spreads dozens of radio antennas across the Chajnantor plateau at around 5,000 metres, and the Paranal Observatory crowns a desert peak with the Very Large Telescope. Nearby, the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works recall the nitrate boom that once fed the world's fertiliser industry. In Colombia, the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá was carved inside a working salt mine deep underground.
In the Andes, Peru's Q'eswachaka Bridge is woven anew each year from grass rope by Quechua communities, continuing an Inca technique, and Argentina's Tren a las Nubes climbs to the La Polvorilla viaduct. Venezuela's Mérida cable car rises to the high Sierra Nevada de Mérida, and Brazil's Serra do Rio do Rastro road coils down an escarpment in tight hairpins. The cities add their own landmarks: the Sugarloaf Cable Car in Rio, among the first in the world, the triple arches of the Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge in Brasília, and Santiago Calatrava's swinging Puente de la Mujer in Buenos Aires. At the far south, Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse stands on a rock in the Beagle Channel.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Atacama Large Millimeter Array | Radio telescope | Chile | |
| 2 | Sugarloaf Cable Car | Aerial tramway | Brazil | |
| 3 | Juscelino Kubitschek bridge | Bridge | Brazil | |
| 4 | Paranal Observatory | Observatory | Chile | |
| 5 | Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works | Factory | Chile | ✓ |
| 6 | Puente de la Mujer | Bridge | Argentina | |
| 7 | Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá | Salt mine | Colombia | |
| 8 | Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Argentina | |
| 9 | Mérida cable car | Aerial tramway | Venezuela | |
| 10 | Q'eswachaka Bridge | Bridge | Peru | |
| 11 | Tren a las Nubes | Heritage railway | Argentina | |
| 12 | Serra do Rio do Rastro | Mountain pass | Brazil |
01 Atacama Large Millimeter Array
Chile23.019° S 67.753° W
Iztok Bončina/ESO · CC BY 4.0 What makes ALMA visually unusual among observatories is that it does not stand still. The dishes can be picked up by two enormous custom haulers, 28-wheeled machines of about 130 tonnes each, and set down on different pads, so the array can be squeezed into a knot 150 metres across or spread over a span of 16 kilometres.
Did you know? At its sharpest ALMA can resolve detail of about 10 milliarcseconds, roughly five times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope.
02 Sugarloaf Cable Car
Bondinho do Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.956° S 43.167° W
Image by nuno_lopes from Pixabay The engineer Augusto Ferreira Ramos conceived the line in 1908, inspired by the National Exhibition held that year in Urca to mark a century of Brazil's ports opening to world trade, and rallied members of Rio society to back it. When the first section opened on 27 October 1912 there were only two passenger cableways in the world, one in Spain and one in Switzerland; the summit section followed on 18 January 1913.
Did you know? Each crossing takes only about three minutes, and the line carries roughly 2,500 visitors on an average day.
03 Juscelino Kubitschek bridge
Ponte Juscelino Kubitschek
Brazil · 10.6 km from Brasília15.824° S 47.829° W
Image by Victor000 from Pixabay The bridge was designed by the architect Alexandre Chan with the structural engineer Mário Vila Verde, and built between 2000 and 2002. It is 1,200 metres long, with three spans of 240 metres each. Its deck, 24 metres wide, is carried by the three asymmetrical arches, which rise to about 60 metres and rest on four pillars standing on the lakebed.
Did you know? The deck hangs from 48 steel cables, and 51 electronic sensors monitor how the structure behaves.
04 Paranal Observatory
Observatorio Paranal
Chile24.627° S 70.404° W
European Southern Observatory · CC BY 4.0 8-metre auxiliary telescopes in small white domes. The large telescopes can work alone or be combined with the smaller ones as an interferometer, pooling their light to see finer detail than any one of them could. 6-metre VLT Survey Telescope maps the sky in visible light. Arrays of small robotic telescopes, NGTS and SPECULOOS, hunt for planets around other stars.
Did you know? Linked together as an interferometer, the telescopes reach a resolution of about 0.002 arcseconds, some 25 times finer than a single Unit Telescope.
05 Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works
Chile · 6.8 km from Pozo Almonte20.208° S 69.794° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Both works were founded in 1872, when the territory still belonged to Peru. Santa Laura struggled and was modernised only around 1918 to 1920 with the Shanks leaching process; La Palma, run by James Thomas Humberstone, grew into one of the largest works in Tarapacá. The industry collapsed after German chemists developed synthetic ammonia, and the Great Depression finished the job.
Did you know? Humberstone had its own school, hospital, hotel, market and a swimming pool built of steel sheets, with stands for spectators.
06 Puente de la Mujer
Argentina · 6.2 km from Buenos Aires34.608° S 58.365° W
Carlos Adampol Galindo · CC BY-SA 2.0 Completed in December 2001, it was Calatrava's first project built in Latin America, arriving as Puerto Madero — a stretch of 19th-century brick warehouses along disused docks — was being converted from derelict port infrastructure into what is now one of Buenos Aires's most expensive districts.
Did you know? The steelwork, costing about US$6 million, was fabricated by the Urssa company in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in Spain's Basque Country.
07 Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá
Catedral de Sal
Colombia5.019° N 74.009° W
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 The miners of Zipaquirá carved their own small sanctuary underground around 1932. A first, larger cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary was opened in 1954 in older galleries; it was closed in 1992 because of structural concerns. Its successor was built deeper in the mountain from 1991 to a design by the architect Roswell Garavito Pearl, who won a competition for the commission, and it was inaugurated on 16 December 1995.
Did you know? The present design was chosen from 44 entries in a 1990 competition organised by the Colombian Society of Architects.
08 Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse
Faro Les Éclaireurs
Argentina · 17.2 km from Ushuaia54.872° S 68.083° W
Ricardo Martins · CC BY 2.0 5 metres above the water. Argentines often call it the Lighthouse at the End of the World, but that name really belongs to a different light: the San Juan de Salvamento lighthouse on Isla de los Estados, which inspired Jules Verne's novel of the same title. Les Eclaireurs has simply borrowed the romance, and its location — within sight of the southernmost city in the country — makes the borrowing easy to forgive.
Did you know? In January 1930 the German liner Monte Cervantes tore its hull on an uncharted rock nearby, and its captain deliberately ran the sinking ship onto the Les Eclaireurs reef.
09 Mérida cable car
Teleférico de Mérida
Venezuela · 13.8 km from Mérida8.529° N 71.064° W
Cesar Pérez · CC BY-SA 3.0 The line was built at the end of the 1950s by a consortium of some 25 companies coordinated by the French firm Applevage, with the German company Heckel and the Swiss company Habegger responsible for the cable sections; public service began in March 1960.
Did you know? The rebuilt system, officially named Mukumbarí, an indigenous word said to mean place where the sun sleeps, cost more than 106 million euros.
10 Q'eswachaka Bridge
Puente Queshuachaca
Peru · 29.2 km from Sicuani14.381° S 71.484° W
Aga Khan (IT) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The renewal happens in the second week of June and takes about three days. Four Quechua-speaking communities, Huinchiri, Chaupibanda, Choccayhua and Ccollana Quehue, share the work. Families cut and twist grass into thin cords, the cords are twisted into medium ropes, and those are braided into six great cables.
Did you know? In 1972 the geographer D. W. Gade documented the bridge and predicted its building art would die out within a generation, a forecast that proved wrong.
11 Tren a las Nubes
Argentina · 0.9 km from Salta24.777° S 65.411° W
Gavieiro Juan M · CC BY-SA 3.0 The destination is the Polvorilla Viaduct, a curved steel trestle 224 metres long and 64 metres high that strides across a dry ravine at about 4,220 metres above sea level. From below it looks improbably delicate against the enormous, colourless landscape of the high plateau; from the train, as it creeps across the deck, the ground falls away on both sides.
Did you know? The sculptor Lola Mora, famous in Argentina for her monuments, took part in early surveys for the railway's route across the Andes.
12 Serra do Rio do Rastro
Brazil · 33.9 km from Criciúma28.407° S 49.546° W
Lucas Molina · CC BY-SA 4.0 The climb begins at Guatá, a district of Lauro Müller at the foot of the range, a coal-mining municipality settled largely by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. From there the road passes through dense Atlantic Forest, home to howler and capuchin monkeys, coatis, small wild cats and toucans, then through stunted cloud forest and rock-face vegetation near the crest.
Did you know? Israel Charles White's 1908 report recorded Mesosaurus fossils here and matched the rocks with South Africa's Karoo Basin, across the Atlantic.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the greatest engineering wonders in South America?
- On our list, Atacama Large Millimeter Array (Chile) ranks first, followed by Sugarloaf Cable Car (Brazil) and Juscelino Kubitschek bridge (Brazil).
- Which country has the most engineering wonders in South America?
- In our collection, the most come from Argentina (3), Brazil (3) and Chile (3).
- Why are so many telescopes built in Chile's Atacama Desert?
- The Atacama combines very dry air, high altitude, clear skies on most nights and little light pollution. Low water vapour is especially important for radio arrays like ALMA, because moisture absorbs the wavelengths they observe.
- How is the Q'eswachaka Bridge rebuilt?
- Every year, Quechua communities on both sides of the Apurímac River twist grass into cords and braid them into thick cables, then weave a new bridge in a few days. The tradition continues Inca bridge-building and is recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage.
- How high does the Tren a las Nubes go?
- The train from Salta in northern Argentina reaches the La Polvorilla viaduct at about 4,200 metres above sea level. The line climbs through switchbacks, spirals and viaducts on its way across the Andes.
- How many engineering wonders are on this list in South America?
- The list covers 12 engineering wonders in 6 countries. Argentina has the most, with 3.