Bolivia 🇧🇴

Filed under the Americas and more precisely South America, Bolivia is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Plurinational State of Bolivia. Its seat of government is Sucre.

It covers 1,098,581 km², which ranks it 29th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Ethiopia and just ahead of Mauritania. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Ethiopia.

It is home to roughly 12.4 million people, placing it 78th of 249 by population — between Burundi above it and Tunisia below. Among the 13 entries in South America it ranks 5th by area and 7th by population.

Bolivia 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: Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile 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 Bolivia's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Bolivia's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Bolivia's borders, Paraguay is landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇧🇷 Brazil
• 🇦🇷 Argentina
• 🇵🇪 Peru
• 🇨🇱 Chile

Plotted on a globe it falls at 17.0° south, 65.0° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,892 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Mozambique, Zambia and Fiji — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

5 countries share a land border with it: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 318.6 million people.

Bolivia is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, so all seaborne trade runs through a neighbour's ports. One of its neighbours, Paraguay, is landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Density comes out at around 11 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.

4 languages carry official status: Aymara, Guaraní, Quechua and Spanish. Aymara, the first listed, is shared with 1 other entry worldwide.

People from Bolivia are called Bolivians.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 11th most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for 3.0% of everyone living in South America.

Zoom in from the world to South America and Bolivia sits 7th of 13 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Chile just above and Paraguay 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.

• 🇨🇱 Chile
• 🇵🇾 Paraguay
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

It uses the Bolivian boliviano (Bs., BOB). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Bolivia.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Bolivia, the answer is Sucre.

The top-level domain is .bo. To phone it from abroad you dial +591. Its ISO codes are bo and BOL, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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.

The Bolivian boliviano (BOB) is used only in Bolivia 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, Bolivia 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.