Guinea 🇬🇳

Guinea is a country in Western Africa, one of the 17 entries this site files under that subregion. In formal use it is Republic of Guinea. Conakry is the capital.

By land area it covers 245,857 km², which ranks it 79th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Western Sahara and just ahead of the United Kingdom. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as the United Kingdom.

Around 14.8 million people live there, placing it 74th of 249 by population — between Zimbabwe above it and Benin below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 7th by area and 8th by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 11.0° north, 10.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,225 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Somalia, the Philippines and Cambodia — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

6 countries share a land border with it: Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The largest of them by area is Mali, while the most populous is Ivory Coast. Together those neighbours hold about 91.4 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 60 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 monolingual: 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 Guinea are called Guineans.

Inside Africa it places 27th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 3.2% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Guinea sits 8th of 17 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Senegal just above and Benin just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇸🇳 Senegal
• 🇧🇯 Benin
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

The Guinean franc (GNF) is used only in Guinea 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. French is listed for 46 entries here, 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Guinea ranks 79th of 249 by area and 74th by population. That works out at 0.16% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.18% 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 Guinea in the size ordering are Western Sahara at 266,000 km² and United Kingdom at 242,900 km², against Guinea's 245,857 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Guinea averages 60 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 157th 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 Guinean franc (Fr, GNF). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

The top-level domain is .gn. To phone it from abroad you dial +224. Its ISO codes are gn and GIN, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Conakry is the city to remember for this country.

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.