Lago Chungará y Volcán Parinacota

This is a list of active volcanoes in Chile - volcanoes that have erupted at least once in the Holocene. Some notable extinct volcanoes are also included.

A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in a planet's surface or crust, which allows hot magma, volcanic ash and gases to escape from below the surface.

Volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. A mid-oceanic ridge, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has examples of volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates pulling apart; the Pacific Ring of Fire has examples of volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates coming together. By contrast, volcanoes are usually not created where two tectonic plates slide past one another. Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the Earth's crust in the interiors of plates, e.g., in the East African Rift, the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and the Rio Grande Rift in North America. This type of volcanism falls under the umbrella of "Plate hypothesis" volcanism. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has also been explained as mantle plumes. These so-called "hotspots", for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs with magma from the core-mantle boundary, 3,000 km deep in the Earth.

Parinacota is a massive potentially active stratovolcano on the border of Chile and Bolivia. It is part of the Nevados de Payachata volcanic group. The other major edifice in that group is the Pleistocene peak of Pomerape. Parinacota's last eruptive phase has been dated using the helium surface exposure technique, which ties the eruption to 290AD ± 300 years.

One of the most dramatic eruptive events in the volcano's past was 8,000 years ago, when a major collapse of the edifice produced a 6 km³ debris avalanche, which blocked nearby drainage patterns, creating Chungará Lake.

The volcano and Pomerape straddle the border between Sajama National Park (Bolivia) and Lauca National Park (Chile).

Chile (ⁱ/ˈtʃɪliː/ or /ˈtʃɪleɪ/), officially the Republic of Chile (Spanish: República de Chile [reˈpuβlika ðe ˈtʃile] ( listen)), is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow strip of land between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far south. Along with Ecuador, it is one of two countries in South America that do not border Brazil. Chilean territory includes the Pacific islands of Juan Fernández, Salas y Gómez, Desventuradas and Easter Island. Chile also claims about 1,250,000 square kilometres (480,000 sq mi) of Antarctica, although all claims are suspended under the Antarctic Treaty.