Brazil 🇧🇷

Brazil is an independent state in South America, and a member of the United Nations. Treaties and official documents call it Federative Republic of Brazil. Government sits in Brasília.

The population is about 212.0 million, placing it 7th of 249 by population — between Nigeria above it and Bangladesh below. Among the 13 entries in South America it ranks 1st by area and 1st by population.

The land area is 8,515,767 km², which ranks it 6th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the United States and just ahead of Australia. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a fraction smaller than the United States.

Density comes out at around 25 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Portuguese. Another 9 entries list Portuguese too — among them Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.

Someone from Brazil is a Brazilian.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 2nd most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for 51% of everyone living in South America.

Within South America, Brazil is the most populous of the 13 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Colombia is next in line by population.

Every entry in South America has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Colombia is the place to carry on.

• 🇨🇴 Colombia
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

Its reference point sits at 10.0° south and 55.0° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,113 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The equator passes across it. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste and Christmas Island.

It borders 10 neighbours: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. The largest of them by area is Argentina, while the most populous is Colombia. Together those neighbours hold about 185.7 million people.

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

Put next to every other entry on this site, Brazil ranks 6th of 249 by area and 7th by population. That works out at 5.7% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 2.6% 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 Brazil in the size ordering are United States at 9,372,610 km² and Australia at 7,692,024 km², against Brazil's 8,515,767 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Brazil averages 25 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 197th 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.

The Brazilian real (BRL) is used only in Brazil 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. Portuguese is listed for 10 entries here, Brazil 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.

The currency is the Brazilian real (R$, BRL). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Its internet country code is .br. To phone it from abroad you dial +55. Standard country codes: br and BRA.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Brazil, the answer is Brasília.

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.