Croatia 🇭🇷

Croatia is a country in Southeast Europe, one of the 9 entries this site files under that subregion. In formal use it is Republic of Croatia. Zagreb is the capital.

Around 3.9 million people live there, placing it 129th of 249 by population — between Panama above it and Georgia below. Within Southeast Europe alone it is the 4th largest of 9 and the 4th most populous.

By land area it covers 56,594 km², which ranks it 128th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Togo and just ahead of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is around a fifth smaller than Ireland.

Its reference point sits at 45.2° north and 15.5° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,028 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Mongolia and Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

It borders 5 neighbours: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. The largest of them by area is Hungary, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 22.1 million people.

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

Spread across 56,594 km², that works out at about 68 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: Croatian. It shares that with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

People from Croatia are called Croatians.

Inside Europe it places 27th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 8.5% of everyone living in Southeast Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Southeast Europe and Croatia sits 4th of 9 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Bulgaria just above and Bosnia and Herzegovina just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria
• 🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 🇷🇴 Romania

Croatia does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Croatian is listed for 2 entries here, Croatia 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Croatia ranks 128th of 249 by area and 129th by population. That works out at 0.038% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.048% 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 Croatia in the size ordering are Togo at 56,785 km² and Bosnia and Herzegovina at 51,209 km², against Croatia's 56,594 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Croatia averages 68 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 147th 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.

Money there is the Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Cyprus.

Websites there use the .hr domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +385. Its ISO codes are hr and HRV, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Croatia, the answer is Zagreb.

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.