The largest urban area in South America is São Paulo, followed by Buenos Aires and Lima. São Paulo has 19.5 million people on 2,111 km² of built-up land. 44 urban areas in South America have at least 1 million people or are a national capital; the table lists them all.
| # | City | Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | São Paulo | 19.5 million |
| 2 | Buenos Aires | 14.2 million |
| 3 | Lima | 10.8 million |
| 4 | Bogotá | 10.4 million |
| 5 | Rio de Janeiro | 9.85 million |
| 6 | Santiago | 6.63 million |
| 7 | Belo Horizonte | 4.38 million |
| 8 | Recife | 3.85 million |
| 9 | Fortaleza | 3.32 million |
| 10 | Salvador | 3.31 million |
| 11 | Guayaquil | 3.25 million |
| 12 | Medellín | 3.22 million |
| 13 | Porto Alegre | 2.76 million |
| 14 | Cali | 2.69 million |
| 15 | Caracas | 2.67 million |
| 16 | Quito | 2.61 million |
| 17 | Curitiba | 2.51 million |
| 18 | Goiânia | 2.46 million |
| 19 | Manaus | 2.37 million |
| 20 | Belém | 2.19 million |
| 21 | Barranquilla | 2.17 million |
| 22 | Maracaibo | 2.14 million |
| 23 | La Paz | 2.06 million |
| 24 | Santa Cruz de la Sierra | 2.02 million |
| 25 | Campinas | 1.83 million |
| 26 | Brasília | 1.80 million |
| 27 | Niterói–São Gonçalo | 1.73 million |
| 28 | Valencia | 1.60 million |
| 29 | Córdoba | 1.47 million |
| 30 | Cochabamba | 1.36 million |
| 31 | Vitória | 1.29 million |
| 32 | São Luís | 1.27 million |
| 33 | Montevideo | 1.22 million |
| 34 | Rosario | 1.19 million |
| 35 | Asuncion | 1.18 million |
| 36 | Natal | 1.13 million |
| 37 | Santos | 1.13 million |
| 38 | João Pessoa | 1.12 million |
| 39 | Mendoza | 1.06 million |
| 40 | Maceió | 1.05 million |
| 41 | Arequipa | 1.00 million |
| 42 | Paramaribo | 253,626 |
| 43 | Georgetown | 130,680 |
| 44 | Cayenne | 75,925 |
Urban area = contiguous built-up land and the people living in it in 2025, drawn the same way for every city regardless of administrative boundaries. Source: GHSL Urban Centre Database R2024A, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (CC BY 4.0); some names adjusted to the city names people use, and country attribution follows the dataset.
Official city limits are drawn differently in every country: some take in farmland and mountains, others stop at the historic core. Ranking cities by those limits mostly ranks boundary decisions. These lists use the built-up area instead, so a city's figure includes its suburbs wherever they are continuous with it, and nothing beyond.
For figures inside official limits, see the city-limits rankings; for the background, read how to compare city sizes honestly. Click any city to see it on a map at the same scale as another.