Costa Rica 🇨🇷

Costa Rica is a sovereign country in Central America, in the wider region of the Americas. Its full official name is Republic of Costa Rica. Its seat of government is San José.

The land area is 51,100 km², which ranks it 131st of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Bosnia and Herzegovina and just ahead of Slovakia. For scale, it is around a quarter larger than Denmark.

It is home to roughly 5.1 million people, placing it 127th of 250 by population — between Mauritania above it and Kuwait below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 5th of 7 in size and 5th in population.

Its reference point sits at 10.0° north and 84.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,113 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Ethiopia, Nigeria and Somalia.

It borders 2 neighbours: Nicaragua and Panama. The largest of them by area is Nicaragua, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 11.4 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 100 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

The one official language is Spanish. Another 23 entries list Spanish too — among them Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Someone from Costa Rica is a Costa Rican.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 20th most populous of 56 entries, and it accounts for 9.8% of everyone living in Central America.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Costa Rica ranks 131st of 250 by area and 127th by population. That works out at 0.034% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.063% 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 Costa Rica in the size ordering are Bosnia and Herzegovina at 51,209 km² and Slovakia at 49,037 km², against Costa Rica's 51,100 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Costa Rica averages 100 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 114th of the 248 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.

Zoom in from the world to Central America and Costa Rica sits 5th of 7 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is El Salvador just above and Panama just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇸🇻 El Salvador
• 🇵🇦 Panama
• 🇬🇹 Guatemala

The Costa Rican colón (CRC) is used only in Costa Rica among the 250 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 24 entries here, Costa Rica 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 Costa Rican colón (₡, CRC). It is issued for Costa Rica alone.

San José is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .cr. To phone it from abroad you dial +506. Standard country codes: cr and CRI.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 193 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.