Belgium 🇧🇪

Filed under Europe and more precisely Western Europe, Belgium is a sovereign state. The long form of the name is Kingdom of Belgium. Brussels is the capital.

By land area it covers 30,528 km², which ranks it 141st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Moldova and just ahead of Lesotho. For scale, it is around a fifth smaller than Switzerland.

Around 11.9 million people live there, placing it 81st of 249 by population — between South Sudan above it and Haiti below. Among the 8 entries in Western Europe it ranks 5th by area and 4th by population.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 50.8° N, 4.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,659 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Its land neighbours number 4: France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The largest of them by area is France, while the most populous is Germany. Together those neighbours hold about 170.7 million people.

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

Spread across 30,528 km², that works out at about 388 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

3 languages carry official status: Dutch, French and German. Dutch, the first listed, is shared with 6 other entries worldwide.

Someone from Belgium is a Belgian.

Inside Europe it places 11th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 6.2% of everyone living in Western Europe.

Belgium 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.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Belgium 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.

Zoom in from the world to Western Europe and Belgium sits 4th of 8 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Netherlands just above and Switzerland just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands
• 🇨🇭 Switzerland
• 🇩🇪 Germany

Put next to every other entry on this site, Belgium ranks 141st of 249 by area and 81st by population. That works out at 0.020% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.15% 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 Belgium in the size ordering are Moldova at 33,846 km² and Lesotho at 30,355 km², against Belgium's 30,528 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Belgium averages 388 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 34th 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.

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

If a quiz asks for the capital of Belgium, the answer is Brussels.

Websites there use the .be domain. Calls from overseas start with +32. Standard country codes: be and BEL.

Belgium 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.