Factbox: General facts about Chile

(Reuters) - Thirty-three Chilean miners trapped deep underground sent a message to the surface tied to a drill on Sunday, saying they were all alive, in their first contact since a cave-in 17 days ago, but experts said it would take months to dig them out.

The following are some facts about Chile:

* In February, a massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunamis hammered south-central Chile, killing more than 500 people, hammering industries and causing an estimated $30 billion hit to the economy. It was one of the world's biggest quakes on record.

* In 1960, Chile was hit by the world's biggest earthquake according to records dating to 1900, U.S. Geological Survey data shows. The 9.5-magnitude quake devastated the south-central coastal city of Valdivia, killing 1,655 people and sending a tsunami that battered Easter Island, 2,300 miles off Chile's Pacific seaboard. It continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

* Chile's chain of about 2,000 volcanoes is the world's second-largest after Indonesia, and is part of the Pacific "Ring of Fire" of seismic activity. Some 50 to 60 are on record as having erupted, and 500 are potentially active. The Chaiten volcano, 760 miles south of Santiago in the Patagonia region, erupted in May 2008 for the first time in thousands of years, spewing a plume of ash visible from space.

* Chile is one of the longest countries in the world, stretching around 2,700 miles from its northern desert border with Peru and Bolivia to South America's southern tip by Cape Horn, once a major world shipping route.

* Chile is the world's largest producer of copper, its main export. It produces about 34 percent of world output of the red metal, which is used in electronics, cars and refrigerators. Most of the country's mines are in the North.

* Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile with an iron fist for 17 years from a 1973 coup until 1990. The dictator died in 2006 without facing full trial on rights abuses during his rule, when more than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared and an estimated 28,000 people were tortured.

(Reporting by Santiago Newsroom; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)