Guatemala 🇬🇹

Filed under the Americas and more precisely Central America, Guatemala is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Republic of Guatemala. Its capital, Guatemala City, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Some 18.4 million people call it home, placing it 70th of 249 by population — between Senegal above it and the Netherlands below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 3rd of 7 in size and 1st in population.

Its territory runs to 108,889 km², which ranks it 107th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Cuba and just ahead of Iceland. For scale, it is a little larger than Iceland.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 15.5° N, 90.3° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,725 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

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

Its land neighbours number 4: Belize, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico. The largest of them by area is Mexico, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 148.4 million people.

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

Population divided by land area gives roughly 169 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

The one official language is Spanish. Spanish is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 22 other entries including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

People from Guatemala are called Guatemalans.

Inside the Americas it places 10th of 55 by population, and it accounts for 35% of everyone living in Central America.

The Guatemalan quetzal (GTQ) is used only in Guatemala 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. Spanish is listed for 23 entries here, Guatemala 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.

Within Central America, Guatemala is the most populous of the 7 entries this site lists, and 3rd by area. Honduras is next in line by population.

Every entry in Central America has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Honduras is the place to carry on.

• 🇭🇳 Honduras
• 🇬🇹 Guatemala

Put next to every other entry on this site, Guatemala ranks 107th of 249 by area and 70th by population. That works out at 0.073% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.23% 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 Guatemala in the size ordering are Cuba at 109,884 km² and Iceland at 103,000 km², against Guatemala's 108,889 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Guatemala averages 169 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 79th 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 Guatemalan quetzal (Q, GTQ). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Guatemala.

The top-level domain is .gt. To phone it from abroad you dial +502. Its ISO codes are gt and GTM, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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.