Colombia 🇨🇴

Filed under the Americas and more precisely South America, Colombia is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Colombia. Its seat of government is Bogotá.

The land area is 1,141,748 km², which ranks it 27th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind South Africa and just ahead of Ethiopia. For scale, it is a little larger than Ethiopia.

It is home to roughly 52.9 million people, placing it 28th of 249 by population — between Myanmar above it and South Korea below. Within South America alone it is the 4th largest of 13 and the 2nd most populous.

Density comes out at around 46 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Colombian, so residents are Colombians.

Spanish is the only official language. Another 22 entries list Spanish too — among them Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 4th most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for 13% of everyone living in South America.

Zoom in from the world to South America and Colombia sits 2nd of 13 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Brazil just above and Argentina 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.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil
• 🇦🇷 Argentina
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

The coordinates the dataset gives are 4.0° N, 72.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 445 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

It is one of the countries that the equator crosses. Cameroon, Malaysia and Equatorial Guinea sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

Its land neighbours number 4: Brazil, Panama, Peru and Venezuela. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 279.1 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, Colombia ranks 27th of 249 by area and 28th by population. That works out at 0.76% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.65% 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 Colombia in the size ordering are South Africa at 1,221,037 km² and Ethiopia at 1,104,300 km², against Colombia's 1,141,748 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Colombia averages 46 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 171st 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 Colombian peso (COP) is used only in Colombia 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, Colombia 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 Colombian peso ($, COP). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Colombia.

Bogotá is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .co. Calls from overseas start with +57. In ISO terms it is co in two letters and COL 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.