Celebrating the Top Universities in Latin America 2014

While the world has been going Brazil-crazy over the World Cup, here at TopUniversities.com we’ve also been celebrating the entire Latin American region, during the month following the launch of the 2014 QS University Rankings: Latin America. In case you’ve been too busy keeping up with the on-pitch action to catch all our articles and blog posts, fear not: here’s a round-up just for you.

Top universities in Latin America – overall

Following the big launch on 27 May, we kicked off (totally gratuitous World Cup pun fully intended) with a commentary on the changes at the top of this year’s Latin America ranking. The big headline? Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile climbed to the number one spot, knocking off Brazil’s Universidade de São Paulo. Read the full article here.

We also took a closer look at this year’s top 10 universities in Latin America, in a “listicle” which proved immensely popular, racking up thousands of social media shares within just hours. This provided some further insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of Latin America’s leading institutions, probing the seven performance indicators used to create the ranking.

Updates to our Latin American country guides

This also seemed the ideal time to update some of our student-focused Latin American country guides, designed to help prospective international students decide on a study destination and get started with the application process. Our guide to studying in Brazil had already had a recent revamp (thanks to the BRICS ranking release), so next on our list to update were Chile, Mexico and Argentina.

Celebrating Latin American languages, cuisine and natural wonders

Researching the country guides obviously made us all want to immediately get on a plane and go travelling around as many Latin American countries as possible. Assuming that any international students heading to the region would have a similar impulse, we put together a guide to travelling in Latin America on a student budget, and took a look at some of the most useful – and amusing – expressions in Latin American Spanish that could come in handy along the way.

Finally, we indulged ourselves with these amazing images of 10 of the most beautiful places in Latin America, took a virtual tour of traditional Latin American cuisine, and got to know a little bit more about some of the region’s most famous figures from the worlds of art, politics and philosophy. Turns out those figures all had some pretty inspirational things to say – enough to provide that final bit of motivation for anyone wavering on the edge of visiting, travelling around or studying in a Latin American country.

Image credit (carnival): gary yim / Shutterstock.com