Bahrain 🇧🇭

Filed under Asia and more precisely Western Asia, Bahrain is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Kingdom of Bahrain. The capital is Manama.

Its territory runs to 765 km², which ranks it 192nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Kiribati and just ahead of Dominica. For scale, it is a little larger than Singapore.

Some 1.6 million people call it home, placing it 153rd of 249 by population — between Kosovo above it and Timor-Leste below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 17th of 17 in size and 17th in population.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Bahrain ranks 192nd of 249 by area and 153rd by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.020% 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 Bahrain in the size ordering are Kiribati at 811 km² and Dominica at 751 km², against Bahrain's 765 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Bahrain averages 2,077 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it one of the most densely settled places on the whole list — 6th 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.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 26.0° north, 50.5° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,894 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Algeria, Western Sahara and Bangladesh — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Bahrain has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Qatar, roughly 90 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Bahrain's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Spread across 765 km², that works out at about 2,077 people per square kilometre, which makes it among the most densely populated places on earth. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from Bahrain are called Bahrainis.

The one official language is Arabic. Arabic is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 24 other entries including Algeria, Chad, the Comoros and Djibouti.

Inside Asia it places 45th of 50 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Western Asia.

Within Western Asia, Bahrain is the least populous of the 17 entries listed here, and 17th by area. Qatar is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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

• 🇶🇦 Qatar
• 🇹🇷 Türkiye

The Bahraini dinar (BHD) is used only in Bahrain 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. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Bahrain 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.

Money there is the Bahraini dinar (.د.ب, BHD). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Bahrain.

Websites there use the .bh domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +973. Its ISO codes are bh and BHR, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Bahrain, the answer is Manama.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.