Argentina 🇦🇷

Argentina is a sovereign country in South America, in the wider region of the Americas. In formal use it is Argentine Republic. Buenos Aires is the capital.

Around 45.7 million people live there, placing it 35th of 249 by population — between Iraq above it and Afghanistan below. Within South America alone it is the 2nd largest of 13 and the 3rd most populous.

By land area it covers 2,780,400 km², which ranks it 9th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind India and just ahead of Kazakhstan. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Kazakhstan.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 34.0° south, 64.0° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 3,785 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

It borders 5 neighbours: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 254.5 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Spread across 2,780,400 km², that works out at about 16 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from Argentina are called Argentines.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Guaraní and Spanish. Guaraní, the first listed, is shared with 2 other entries worldwide.

Inside the Americas it places 5th of 55 by population, and it accounts for 11% of everyone living in South America.

Zoom in from the world to South America and Argentina sits 3rd of 13 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Colombia just above and Peru just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇴 Colombia
• 🇵🇪 Peru
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

The Argentine peso (ARS) is used only in Argentina among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Spanish is listed for 23 entries here, Argentina among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Argentina ranks 9th of 249 by area and 35th by population. That works out at 1.9% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.56% 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 Argentina in the size ordering are India at 3,287,590 km² and Kazakhstan at 2,724,900 km², against Argentina's 2,780,400 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Argentina averages 16 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 215th 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.

It uses the Argentine peso ($, ARS). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

The top-level domain is .ar. The international dialling code is +54. Its ISO codes are ar and ARG, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Buenos Aires is the city to remember for this country.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.