Americas Budget Travel Guide introduces you to the lands of the New World, also known as the Western hemisphere. I write this to assemble the travel information related to the continents of North America and South America. This page serves as the introduction to the budget travel guides for all the countries within the Americas.
Mount McKinley, Alaska
Author: Nic McPhee (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)
About the Americas
The Americas refer to the North America and South America. Together it covers 8.3 % of the Earth's total surface and 28.4% of its total land area, and is home to approximately 900 million people, representing 13.5% of the world's population.
Spanish is spoken by 310 million people as a first language in the Americas while English by approximately 300 million as a first language. French is also spoken by some 12 million people in Canada, Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Acadiana.
St Louis, Missouri, USA
Author: Daniel Schwen (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)
North America
North America is one of the seven continents of the world, located on the northern portion of the Americas. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the North Pacific Ocean. North America covers an area of about 24,709,000 square kilometers (9,540,000 square miles), or about 4.8% of the earth's surface or about 16.5% of its land area. North America is also the fourth most populous continent in the world, with nearly 529 million people as of July 2008. It is the third-largest continent in area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth in population after Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Central America
Central America is a geographic region that can be considered as the southern part of North America. It is a tapering isthmus renowned for its Mesoamerican culture and history. The isthmus connects with South America on the southeast.
Central America extends from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico southeastward to the Isthmus of Panama from where it connects to the Colombian Pacific Lowlands in northwestern South America. The Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt delimits the region on the north. Central America covers an area of about 592,000 square kilometres. It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, and the Gulf of Mexico to the north. Most of Central America rests atop the Caribbean Plate.
Central America is a geologically active region. It is prone to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occurring from time to time. Among the cities that have been devastated by earthquake include the capital of Nicaragua, Managua, in 1931 and 1972, and El Salvador, in 1986 and twice in 2001.
The Caribbean
The Caribbean is a region consisting of the Caribbean Sea, the islands around it, and the surrounding coasts. The region is located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and North America, east of Central America, and to the north of South America.
The Caribbean consists of more than 7,000 islands, islets, reefs, and cays. These islands are called the West Indies, because Christopher Columbus believed he had reached the Indies in Asia when he arrived there in 1492. They form arcs that delineate the eastern and northern edges of the Caribbean Sea.
The West Indies are usually regarded as a subregion of North America and are organised into 27 territories including sovereign states, overseas departments, and dependencies. The region is collectively called the Caribbean, which comes from the Carib, a group of natives living in in the Lesser Antilles and parts of South America when the Europeans arrived. In the English-speaking world, a person from the Caribbean is usually called a "West Indian."
Sugarloaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Author: Wutzofant (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5)
South America
South America is the continent on the southern portion of the Americas. Most of South America is located in the Southern Hemisphere although a small portion of it is in the Northern Hemisphere. South America is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest.
South America, along with the rest of the Americas, was named in 1580 by cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann after Amerigo Vespucci, the first European who suggested that the Americas were not the East Indies, but is actually a New World unknown previously to Europeans. South America has an area of 17,840,000 square kilometers (6,890,000 sq mi), or almost 3.5% of the Earth's surface. As of 2005, its population was estimated at more than 371,090,000. South America ranks fourth in area after Asia, Africa, and North America, and fifth in population after Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America.
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