Chile is one of the two wealthiest countries in Latin America with Uruguay. The country lies along a narrow strip of land along the west coast of the South American continent bordered by the Andes mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Chile’s climate ranges from some of the driest hottest deserts to frozen Antarctic landscapes. It’s wealth is multidimensional based on mineral wealth including copper, and great agricultural produce including fruits and wines. Philatelically, Chile is fairly simple though the country is an interesting one to collect. The first issues (the imperforate Columbus heads) are very specialized and Scott lists different printings with the same plates as different stamps which is more specialized than most people need. But after that the stamps are pretty straight forward and not very expensive though not easy to find. Chile has long had one of the more conservative stamp issuing policies and even today the Chilean post office issues only about twenty stamps per year. There are way less than 2000 different stamps needed to complete the country compared to 7,000+ for Grenada which has issued a staggering 6,500 stamp issues per hundred thousand population ( if China had issued as many stamps per capita as Grenada it would have over 9,000,000 different stamp issues by now!!). And a complete Chile collection can be assembled for a modest price for such a major country with so many well designed stamps-probably for under a thousand dollars- a complete country for the price of a set of Zepps.
