Curated category
Republics
- AlgeriaAlgeria spans over 2,381,741 square kilometres, making it the largest country in Africa and the tenth largest on Earth. Most of that vast surface is the…
- Marshall IslandsThe Marshall Islands is 98.62 percent water. No other sovereign state on Earth carries so much ocean against so little land.
- GaṇasaṅghaGautama Buddha was born into a Gana-Sangha. That small tribal state, known as the Shakyas, operated not under a king but under an assembly of men gathered to…
- DjiboutiDjibouti is a country in the Horn of Africa, and it carries the smallest population in mainland Africa. The 2024 census counted 1,066,809 people, recorded on…
- UzbekistanUzbekistan sits at the very center of the world's largest landmass, and it touches no ocean, no sea, and no coast of any kind.
- Burkina FasoBurkina Faso sits at the heart of West Africa, entirely landlocked, ringed by six countries and a history that refuses to be still.
- North KoreaNorth Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is a country that Amnesty International considers to hold the worst human rights record in…
- SenegalSenegal occupies a singular position on the map of Africa: it is the westernmost country on the entire mainland of the Old World, the very edge of…
- LatviaLatvia covers 64,573 square kilometres on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, yet its population numbers only 1.83 million people.
- El SalvadorEl Salvador sits at the western edge of Central America, the smallest and most densely packed country on the continental mainland, a place its own people…
- GuatemalaThe name Guatemala comes from the Nahuatl word Cuauhtemallan, meaning "place of many trees." The Mexica first used it to describe a single Kaqchikel city…
- HaitiHaiti is the only country in history established by a slave revolt. On the 1st of January 1804, in the town of Gonaives, the leaders of the Haitian…
- PeruPeru traces its heritage back to the 10th millennium BCE and the Caral-Supe civilization, the earliest civilization in the Americas.
- Democratic Republic of the CongoThe Democratic Republic of the Congo holds enough cobalt to power the world's electric cars, yet ranks 171 out of 193 countries on the Human Development…
- 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…
- MoldovaMoldova is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of 33,843 square kilometres and a population of about 2.38 million people.
- KazakhstanKazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on Earth, a place where you can stand west of the Ural River in Europe, then travel east into Asia without…
- LaosBetween 1964 and 1973, American aircraft dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos. That is more than all the bombs dropped by American planes during…
- Georgia (country)Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and West Asia, a country of 3.9 million people whose language bears no relation to any other language family…
- 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.
- ArgentinaArgentina covers 2,780,085 square kilometres, making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil and the eighth-largest in the world.
- 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…
- TaiwanTaiwan sits in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, tucked between the East and South China Seas, with the People's Republic of China to its northwest, Japan to…
- AzerbaijanAzerbaijan sits at a crossroads so ancient and contested that even its name carries the echoes of a Persian satrap from the age of Alexander the Great.
- IndonesiaIndonesia stretches more than 5,120 kilometres from east to west, scattered across over 17,000 islands between the Indian and Pacific oceans.
- 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.
- MongoliaMongolia is the most sparsely populated sovereign state on Earth, setting aside the partially unrecognized Western Sahara.
- NepalNepal holds eight of the world's ten highest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point above mean sea level on Earth.
- Ivory CoastIvory Coast holds a distinction that few nations on earth can claim: it supplies more cocoa beans to the world than any other country.
- ColombiaColombia takes its name from the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus, a label first meant to describe the entire New World.
- ChinaChina sits in East Asia, home to more than 1.4 billion people, roughly 17 percent of everyone alive. Spread across about 9.6 million square kilometers, it is…
- IsraelThe Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian monument dated to the late 13th century BCE, bears the earliest known archaeological reference to Israel as a…
- 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…
- PhilippinesThe Philippines spreads across roughly 7,641 islands in the western Pacific Ocean, a country with a population of over 114 million.
- 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.
- TurkeyTurkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is home to over 86 million people. Its capital, Ankara, sits inland on the high central plateau, while Istanbul…
- VietnamVietnam is as little as 50 kilometres across at its narrowest point, in the central Quảng Bình province, yet it widens to around 600 kilometres in the north.
- IcelandIceland sits on a rift where two of the planet's great tectonic plates, the Eurasian and the North American, are slowly pulling apart.
- RomaniaRomania sits at a crossroads that ancient peoples recognized long before modern borders were drawn. Fossils found in a cave called Peștera cu Oase, which…
- CubaCuba sits at the convergence of three bodies of water: the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. An archipelago of more than four…
- MaldivesThe Maldives sits an average of just 1.5 metres above the sea that surrounds it. Its highest natural point reaches only 2.4 metres, which makes it the…
- BelarusBelarus sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe, a landlocked country of 9.1 million people spanning 207,600 square kilometres, bordered by Russia, Ukraine…
- UkraineUkraine covers 603,628 square kilometres of Eastern Europe, making it the second-largest country on the continent after Russia.
- CroatiaCroatia sits at the edge of the Adriatic Sea, a country of over a thousand islands and islets, where the water shifts from turquoise to mint green over…
- 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.