Eritrea 🇪🇷

Eritrea is a country in Eastern Africa, one of the 20 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is State of Eritrea. Its seat of government is Asmara.

It covers 117,600 km², which ranks it 101st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Malawi and just ahead of Benin. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a fraction smaller than Greece.

It is home to roughly 3.5 million people, placing it 131st of 249 by population — between Georgia above it and Mongolia below. Among the 20 entries in Eastern Africa it ranks 11th by area and 13th by population.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 15.0° N, 39.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,670 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Mali, Thailand and the Philippines sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

3 countries share a land border with it: Djibouti, Ethiopia and Sudan. The largest of them by area is Sudan, while the most populous is Ethiopia. Together those neighbours hold about 183.7 million people.

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

Spread across 117,600 km², that works out at about 30 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 Eritrean, so residents are Eritreans.

3 languages carry official status: Arabic, English and Tigrinya. Tigrinya is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Eritrea. Arabic, the first listed, is shared with 24 other entries worldwide.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 40th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

The Eritrean nakfa (ERN) is used only in Eritrea 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. English is listed for 91 entries here, Eritrea 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.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Eritrea sits 13th of 20 by population and 11th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Burundi just above and Mauritius just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇧🇮 Burundi
• 🇲🇺 Mauritius
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

Put next to every other entry on this site, Eritrea ranks 101st of 249 by area and 131st by population. That works out at 0.078% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.044% 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 Eritrea in the size ordering are Malawi at 118,484 km² and Benin at 112,622 km², against Eritrea's 117,600 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Eritrea averages 30 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 187th 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.

It uses the Eritrean nakfa (Nfk, ERN). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Eritrea.

The top-level domain is .er. To phone it from abroad you dial +291. In ISO terms it is er in two letters and ERI in three.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Eritrea, the answer is Asmara.

Eritrea is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.