Andorra 🇦🇩

Filed under Europe and more precisely Southern Europe, Andorra is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Principality of Andorra. Its capital, Andorra la Vella, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Some 81,938 people call it home, placing it 203rd of 249 by population — between the Isle of Man above it and the Cayman Islands below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 6th of 10 in size and 7th in population.

Its territory runs to 468 km², which ranks it 200th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Guam and just ahead of the Northern Mariana Islands. For scale, it is about half again the size of Malta.

Andorra has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: France and Spain have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Andorra's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Andorra's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇪🇸 Spain

Plotted on a globe it falls at 42.5° north, 1.5° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,731 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

2 countries share a land border with it: France and Spain. The largest of them by area is France, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 117.4 million people.

Andorra is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Andorra ranks 200th of 249 by area and 203rd by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Andorra in the size ordering are Guam at 549 km² and Northern Mariana Islands at 464 km², against Andorra's 468 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Andorra averages 175 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 77th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 175 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Andorran, so residents are Andorrans.

The one official language is Catalan. No other entry in this dataset lists Catalan, so on this list it stands alone.

Inside Europe it places 44th of 53 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Southern Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Europe and Andorra sits 7th of 10 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Malta just above and Gibraltar just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Italy is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southern Europe has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇲🇹 Malta
• 🇬🇮 Gibraltar
• 🇮🇹 Italy

Andorra does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in EUR travels further than you might expect.

Catalan is listed for Andorra and for no other entry on this site. A language confined to one country is unusual, and it is normally a sign of long isolation or of deliberate revival.

It uses the Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia and Cyprus.

The top-level domain is .ad. To phone it from abroad you dial +376. In ISO terms it is ad in two letters and AND in three.

Andorra is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.