If you want safety, stay away from Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela or Brazil. There are many places in these countries where violent crime is a rather frequent sight.
Costa Rica is the safest country south of the border that's not in the Southern Cone. It's also a beautiful, green, peaceful country.
Santiago, Chile is the safest large city in Latin America, and Chile overall is about as safe as the U.S.; only Canada is safer in the Americas. Although there are plenty of pickpockets, there's next to no violent crime.
Personally, I love Colombia, and Bogota is a nice city. Best thing to do is make some contacts in whichever country you plan to go to, maybe join couchsurfers or something similar, then you'll have someone to familiarise you with the country. Most of these South American countries are quite safe if you know your way around.
Costa Rica and Panama are possibly the best, in terms of safety and democratic stability.
Hey there,
I'm studying for a degree in Modern Languages, which means that I study French, German and Spanish. As part of my degree I have to do a mandatory year abroad, so I thought that South America would be an interesting destination to aim for for my Spanish part of the course.
The thing is, I don't think I could handle living in somewhere incredibly dangerous and my parents have given me a sense of caution about going to certain places due to the reputations that they have. I really want to go to a big city, the reason for that being that I'm from a small town in a city that has a tiny city centre and isn't considered to be nice. My uni town is nicer but is still small. Plus it was my insurance choice uni; I wanted to study in a big city but didn't get the grades to fulfill my offer. I was thinking Buenos Aires and I haven't heard anything to bad about Chile, so Santiago struck me as pretty cool.
Where would you go, taking into account that I'll have to live there for about four and a half months and I'll be thousands of miles from home.
Thank you so much! :D x
