Three, unless the plan you buy is the Global one — and then only because its own page prints all three names. Horizon sells Brazil, Argentina and Chile as three separate country plans, a page each, and there is no South American or Latin American bundle waiting behind them: on the day this was written the regional shelf carried bundles for other parts of the world and none at all for the Americas, so read that page for its current list. The address you would guess at for a continental plan returns nothing, a decision rather than an omission.
So: three purchases, or one Global purchase whose destination list you have read name by name. The rest of this is the working — why the continent sells this way, the minute that settles it anywhere, where our three stop, and the arithmetic for four trips that each cross a line.
A continent on the map, a column of names in the catalogue
A travel data plan is put together country by country, because that is the shape of the wholesale deals sitting under it. What gets negotiated separately gets sold separately, and a shelf built that way will never match the region a traveller carries in their head. South America is a single mental object. A plan is a column of names.
The neighbours are where this bites. Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru are each sold here as destinations in their own right, and every one of them can be entered from the three big countries in the course of an ordinary day out. Not one of those excursions feels like leaving a country while it is happening. To a catalogue, every one of them does.
The list is the product, and it takes a minute to read
Before paying anybody, ours included:
- Write the route as a column of country names. Not regions, not the continent — the names, including the one you enter only for an afternoon.
- Open the plan itself rather than the shop's front page. A banner number is advertising; the list attached to a plan is a specification.
- Read your column against that list, one name at a time. A name is printed there or it is absent, and a neighbouring country is not an entry.
- Read the window as well as the places. A long, slow route can run out of days well before it runs out of gigabytes.
- Keep what you were shown. A page is easy to reopen from a hotel, awkward in a queue of cars.
Where our three country plans stop
Three pages, three ladders, three sets of terms: the Brazil eSIM, the Argentina eSIM and the Chile eSIM. All three answer the border question outright in their own questions rather than making you deduce it — Chile's takes on an Andean crossing and Easter Island, while Brazil's and Argentina's each handle the falls from their own bank.
The ladders are the plainest evidence that these are three products and not one wearing three names. On the pages as they stand, each opens with short week-long rungs, the smallest measured in megabytes, then switches to a thirty-day column starting at 3 GB, and Brazil's carries on past the rung where the other two stop. Nor does buying two make one larger plan: each arrives as its own profile, with its own allowance and its own last valid day.
The single-plan route, and the condition attached
There is a fourth product, and it is the only honest one-eSIM answer here: the Global plan. Open its coverage list and you get the destinations it is sold for; on the day this was written Argentina, Brazil and Chile were each named there, along with Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia and Ecuador. Read that as the condition it is. A printed entry settles a stop; the word global does not, and a list can be edited after an article is published.
Its windows are cut differently too, which is the part worth doing sums over. At the time of writing the smallest size ran a year, the middle sizes thirty days, the largest ninety. A fortnight in two cities is not the trip that shape was drawn for. Two slow months across all three countries, with a week in a fourth, very much is.
Buenos Aires, with a day in Uruguay
The fast ferry out of Puerto Madero reaches Colonia del Sacramento in about an hour, and the day is the easiest kind: cobbled streets, lunch, the boat back in time for dinner. Nothing about it resembles a second country. Uruguay is one, and it is sold here on a page of its own.
For one day there are two straight answers and no third: buy something small for Uruguay, or spend the afternoon on the Wi-Fi of a café you were going to sit in anyway. What fails is treating the river as a detail.
The falls, from whichever bank you booked
Iguazú puts three countries inside one afternoon. Puerto Iguazú is Argentine, Foz do Iguaçu Brazilian, Ciudad del Este Paraguayan, and two bridges join them. The Argentine park is the walking day, out on catwalks above the water; the Brazilian side gives the whole thing at once from its panoramic path; Paraguay is a short drive from the second bridge.
A handset does not read bridges. It reads lists. Size the plan for the side you sleep on, buy the second country only where the far bank is a real day rather than a maybe, and settle both before you leave the town you are staying in.
Two crossings that happen to be roads
Mendoza to Santiago is the classic one. Ruta 7 climbs through Uspallata and past Puente del Inca to Paso Los Libertadores, where the tunnel under the pass sits above three thousand metres, then drops through switchbacks toward Los Andes and the Chilean central valley. The bus takes most of a day, border control included. Half of it is spent in Argentina and half in Chile, a division the ticket never mentions.
The far south is the version that quietly costs people money. The road between El Calafate and Puerto Natales crosses at Cerro Castillo, and Torres del Paine is entered from the Chilean end of it. A fortnight sold to yourself as Patagonia can easily spend more nights in Chile than in Argentina, which makes the Chilean plan the main purchase and the Argentine one the supporting act — the opposite of what a flight into Buenos Aires suggests.
Tip: Both crossings depend on weather. A high pass or a southern park road can shut for a day, and the date you meant to change countries is the first thing a storm takes off the calendar. If the second country is one date in a fortnight, decide in advance what you will do when that date moves.
Quick answers
Does a Brazil plan work on the Argentine side of the falls? Only where Argentina is named on the plan you bought, and a Brazil country plan does not name it.
Is there a South America plan? No — none on the regional page as it stands, and the continental address returns nothing.
Three country plans, or one Global one? Count nights rather than countries. Two or three proper stays point at the country plans; a long wandering route through all three, plus a neighbour, is what the Global windows were cut for.
What about Easter Island, or an afternoon in Bolivia? Both are read off the list rather than off the map. Chile's own page answers the island directly.
Which one do I buy first? The country you sleep in most. The rest can be settled at a desk with a connection you trust, before you cross anything.
Sizes, day counts and the exact places each offer names sit on the three destination pages above. For the longer version at either end of the continent, the Brazil buyer's guide and the Argentina one go through sizing and days.
