Gabon 🇬🇦

Filed under Africa and more precisely Middle Africa, Gabon is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Gabonese Republic. Libreville is the capital.

Around 2.5 million people live there, placing it 142nd of 249 by population — between the Gambia above it and Botswana below. Among the 10 entries in Middle Africa it ranks 8th by area and 8th by population.

By land area it covers 267,668 km², which ranks it 77th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind New Zealand and just ahead of Western Sahara. That makes it almost exactly the same size as New Zealand.

Its reference point sits at 1.0° south and 11.8° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 111 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

The equator runs through or very close to it. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Nauru.

It borders 3 neighbours: Cameroon, Congo and Equatorial Guinea. The largest of them by area is Cameroon, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 37.3 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Density comes out at around 9.5 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

The one official language is French. French is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 45 other entries including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

People from Gabon are called Gabonese.

Inside Africa it places 43rd of 59 by population, and it accounts for 1.1% of everyone living in Middle Africa.

Gabon 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, Gabon 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 Middle Africa and Gabon sits 8th of 10 by population and 8th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Central African Republic just above and Equatorial Guinea 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.

• 🇨🇫 Central African Republic
• 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea
• 🇨🇩 DR Congo

Put next to every other entry on this site, Gabon ranks 77th of 249 by area and 142nd by population. That works out at 0.18% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.031% 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 Gabon in the size ordering are New Zealand at 270,467 km² and Western Sahara at 266,000 km², against Gabon's 267,668 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Gabon averages 9 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 223rd 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 Central African CFA franc (Fr, XAF). It shares that currency with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Equatorial Guinea.

The top-level domain is .ga. The international dialling code is +241. Its ISO codes are ga and GAB, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Gabon, the answer is Libreville.

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.