Eswatini 🇸🇿

Filed under Africa and more precisely Southern Africa, Eswatini is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Kingdom of Eswatini. Its seat of government is Lobamba.

The land area is 17,364 km², which ranks it 159th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Kuwait and just ahead of Timor-Leste. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is about half again the size of Qatar.

It is home to roughly 1.2 million people, placing it 159th of 249 by population — between Mauritius above it and Djibouti below. Among the 5 entries in Southern Africa it ranks 5th by area and 5th by population.

Eswatini has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: South Africa and Mozambique have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Eswatini's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Eswatini's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇿🇦 South Africa
• 🇲🇿 Mozambique

The coordinates the dataset gives are 26.5° S, 31.5° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,950 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Australia and the Pitcairn Islands sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

2 countries share a land border with it: Mozambique and South Africa. The largest of them by area is South Africa, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 98.6 million people.

It has no sea coast of its own. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, so all seaborne trade runs through a neighbour's ports. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Eswatini ranks 159th of 249 by area and 159th by population. That works out at 0.012% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.015% 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 Eswatini in the size ordering are Kuwait at 17,818 km² and Timor-Leste at 14,874 km², against Eswatini's 17,364 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Eswatini averages 72 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 144th 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.

Spread across 17,364 km², that works out at about 72 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.

People from Eswatini are called Swazis.

2 languages carry official status: English and Swazi. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 49th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 1.7% of everyone living in Southern Africa.

Within Southern Africa, Eswatini is the least populous of the 5 entries listed here, and 5th by area. Lesotho is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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

• 🇱🇸 Lesotho
• 🇿🇦 South Africa

Eswatini does not have the South African rand to itself. It is one of 5 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is ZAR, 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 ZAR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Eswatini 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.

More than one currency circulates: Swazi lilangeni (SZL) and South African rand (ZAR). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Eswatini.

The top-level domain is .sz. To phone it from abroad you dial +268. Its ISO codes are sz and SWZ, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Eswatini, the answer is Lobamba.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.