Curated category
OECD members
- JapanJapan sits at the edge of the Pacific, a chain of 14,125 islands stretching more than 3,000 kilometers from the frigid Sea of Okhotsk to the warm East China…
- United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland sits off the northwestern coast of continental Europe, home to over 69 million people in 2024.
- LatviaLatvia covers 64,573 square kilometres on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, yet its population numbers only 1.83 million people.
- AustraliaAustralia is the world's flattest and driest inhabited continent, a land area of 7,688,287 square kilometres that ranks sixth-largest among all countries.
- ItalyItaly is a peninsula that reaches out into the Mediterranean Sea, anchored by the Alps along its northern border and trailed by nearly 800 islands, the…
- FinlandFinland sits between latitudes 60 and 70 degrees north, making it one of the world's northernmost countries. Of all world capitals, only Reykjavik lies…
- PortugalPortugal sits at the far southwestern edge of Europe, a country where the land simply runs out and the Atlantic takes over.
- CanadaCanada is the second-largest country in the world by total area, yet most of its people cluster in a thin band near a single neighbour.
- SpainSpain holds the southernmost point of continental Europe, and yet its reach has never stopped at the edge of the Iberian Peninsula.
- FranceFrance received 102 million foreign visitors in 2025, more than any other country on Earth. Behind that number sits a stranger fact.
- LithuaniaLithuania once stretched across more land than any other country in Europe. In the first half of the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania reached…
- DenmarkDenmark sits at the southern tip of Scandinavia, a country made up of a single peninsula and 406 islands, yet its reach extends far beyond that modest…
- SwedenSweden stretches from the 55th parallel to the 69th, a country so long that its southern tip sits closer to Rome than to its own Arctic north.
- New ZealandNew Zealand sits alone in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, a pair of islands so remote that they were the last large habitable land on Earth to be settled by…
- GermanyGermany sits at the geographic heart of Europe, touching nine countries and two seas, and its 82 million people make it the European Union's most populous…
- ChileChile stretches like a ribbon down the western edge of South America, running more than 4,300 kilometers from the driest desert on Earth to the last scrap of…
- EstoniaEstonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, sits at the edge of Northern Europe where the Baltic Sea meets the Gulf of Finland.
- NorwayNorway gives the United Kingdom a Christmas tree every December, a quiet thank-you for British help during the Second World War.
- BelgiumBelgium sits at the crossroads of Northwestern Europe, squeezed between France, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and the North Sea, covering just 30,689…
- ColombiaColombia takes its name from the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus, a label first meant to describe the entire New World.
- GreeceGreece, officially the Hellenic Republic, has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean. It is a country of 10 million people on the southern tip of the…
- PolandPoland lost the highest percentage of its citizens of any country in the Second World War. Around 6 million people perished, more than one-sixth of the…
- South KoreaSouth Korea, officially the Republic of Korea, claims to be the sole legitimate government of the entire Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands.
- MexicoMexico domesticated maize, the tomato, and beans, three plants that would feed much of the world. Human presence on this land reaches back at least to 8,000…
- IcelandIceland sits on a rift where two of the planet's great tectonic plates, the Eurasian and the North American, are slowly pulling apart.
- NetherlandsThe Netherlands, a country in Northwestern Europe, has spent centuries in a struggle unlike almost any other on earth: a fight not against rival nations…
- SwitzerlandSwitzerland sits at the crossroads of four languages, three mountain ranges, and a thousand years of deliberate self-invention.
- Czech RepublicThe Czech Republic holds a ceramic figurine that is, by current archaeological reckoning, the oldest of its kind ever found anywhere on Earth.
- SloveniaSlovenia sits at the crossroads of four of Europe's great geographic worlds: the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pannonian Plain, and the Dinaric mountains.
- AustriaAustria sits at the geographic heart of Europe, a landlocked country of 83,879 square kilometres where the Eastern Alps give way to the Pannonian Plain.