Equatorial Guinea 🇬🇶

Equatorial Guinea lies in Middle Africa, part of Africa. The long form of the name is Republic of Equatorial Guinea. Malabo is the capital.

By land area it covers 28,051 km², which ranks it 146th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Albania and just ahead of Burundi. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Belgium.

Around 1.9 million people live there, placing it 149th of 249 by population — between Slovenia above it and Latvia below. Within Middle Africa alone it is the 9th largest of 10 and the 9th most populous.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 2.0° north, 10.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 223 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Colombia, Malaysia and Suriname — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 2: Cameroon and Gabon. The largest of them by area is Cameroon, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 31.7 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 67 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing French, Portuguese and Spanish. French, the first listed, is shared with 45 other entries worldwide.

People from Equatorial Guinea are called Equatorial Guineans.

Inside Africa it places 47th of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Middle Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Equatorial Guinea ranks 146th of 249 by area and 149th by population. That works out at 0.019% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.023% 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 Equatorial Guinea in the size ordering are Albania at 28,748 km² and Burundi at 27,834 km², against Equatorial Guinea's 28,051 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Equatorial Guinea averages 67 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 149th 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.

Zoom in from the world to Middle Africa and Equatorial Guinea sits 9th of 10 by population and 9th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Gabon just above and São Tomé and Príncipe just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇬🇦 Gabon
• 🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe
• 🇨🇩 DR Congo

Equatorial Guinea does not have the Central African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 6 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XAF, 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 XAF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Equatorial Guinea 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.

Money there is the Central African CFA franc (Fr, XAF). It shares that currency with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Gabon.

Websites there use the .gq domain. Calls from overseas start with +240. Its ISO codes are gq and GNQ, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Malabo is the city to remember for this country.

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.