Cape Verde 🇨🇻

Cape Verde is an independent state in Western Africa, and a member of the United Nations. Its full official name is Republic of Cabo Verde. Government sits in Praia.

It is home to roughly 524,877 people, placing it 174th of 249 by population — between the Maldives above it and Brunei below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 16th of 17 in size and 16th in population.

It covers 4,033 km², which ranks it 177th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind French Polynesia and just ahead of South Georgia. That makes it about half again the size of Luxembourg.

Cape Verde 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 Gambia, roughly 850 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 Cape Verde's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 16.0° north, 24.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,781 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Sudan, Chad and Yemen — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

No land border connects it to another country. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Density comes out at around 130 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Cape Verdian, so residents are Cape Verdians.

The one official language is Portuguese. Another 9 entries list Portuguese too — among them Angola, Brazil, Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 54th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Cape Verde ranks 177th of 249 by area and 174th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent 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 Cape Verde in the size ordering are French Polynesia at 4,167 km² and South Georgia at 3,903 km², against Cape Verde's 4,033 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Cape Verde averages 130 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 96th 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 Cape Verdean escudo (CVE) is used only in Cape Verde 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, Cape Verde 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 Cape Verdean escudo (Esc, CVE). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Cape Verde.

Praia is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .cv. The international dialling code is +238. In ISO terms it is cv in two letters and CPV in three.

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.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Cape Verde sits 16th of 17 by population and 16th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Guinea-Bissau just above and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau
• 🇸🇭 Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria