Chile vs Mexico

Mexico is 2.6 times larger than Chile — 1,964,375 against 756,102 km². Mexico is 6.6 times more populous than Chile — 131,946,900 against 19,859,921 people.

Side by side

Population density

Mexico is 2.6 times more densely populated than Chile — 67 against 26 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• Different currencies: the Chilean peso and the Mexican peso.
• Mexico spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — South America and North America.

Chile

About 4,300 km from north to south and averaging only around 177 km wide — one of the most elongated countries on Earth. The Atacama in the north is the driest non-polar desert in the world, and some weather stations there have never recorded rain. That dryness and altitude is why most of the world's large optical telescopes are built here.

Mexico

Mexico has the fourth-highest count of vertebrate and plant species of any country, and more reptile species than anywhere else. Chicxulub, under the northern Yucatán, is the roughly 180 km crater left by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The Sistema Sac Actun beneath the same peninsula is the longest known underwater cave system in the world, over 370 km surveyed.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.