El Salvador 🇸🇻

El Salvador is a country in Central America, one of the 7 entries this site files under that subregion. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of El Salvador. Government sits in San Salvador.

The population is about 6.3 million, placing it 112th of 250 by population — between Bulgaria above it and Congo below. Within Central America alone it is the 7th largest of 7 and the 4th most populous.

It covers 21,041 km², which ranks it 154th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Belize and just ahead of Israel. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is about two thirds the size of Belgium.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 13.8° N, 88.9° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,540 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Sudan, Chad and Yemen sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

Its land neighbours number 2: Guatemala and Honduras. The largest of them by area is Honduras, while the most populous is Guatemala. Together those neighbours hold about 29.2 million people.

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

Population divided by land area gives roughly 301 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Spanish. Another 23 entries list Spanish too — among them Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Someone from El Salvador is a Salvadoran.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 19th most populous of 56 entries, and it accounts for 12% of everyone living in Central America.

Put next to every other entry on this site, El Salvador ranks 154th of 250 by area and 112th by population. That works out at 0.014% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.078% 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 El Salvador in the size ordering are Belize at 22,966 km² and Israel at 20,770 km², against El Salvador's 21,041 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. El Salvador averages 301 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 46th 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 El Salvador sits 4th of 7 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Nicaragua just above and Costa Rica 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.

• 🇳🇮 Nicaragua
• 🇨🇷 Costa Rica
• 🇬🇹 Guatemala

El Salvador does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 20 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, 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 USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Spanish is listed for 24 entries here, El Salvador 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 United States dollar ($, USD). Another 19 entries use the same currency — American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands and Cambodia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with El Salvador.

Its internet country code is .sv. To phone it from abroad you dial +503. Standard country codes: sv and SLV.

San Salvador is the city to remember for this country.

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.