Honduras 🇭🇳

Honduras is an independent state in Central America, and a member of the United Nations. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Honduras. Its seat of government is Tegucigalpa.

It covers 112,492 km², which ranks it 103rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Benin and just ahead of Liberia. For scale, it is a little larger than Iceland.

It is home to roughly 10.8 million people, placing it 88th of 249 by population — between Czechia above it and Portugal below. Among the 7 entries in Central America it ranks 2nd by area and 2nd by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 15.0° north, 86.5° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,670 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Sudan, Chad and Niger — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 3: Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. The largest of them by area is Nicaragua, while the most populous is Guatemala. Together those neighbours hold about 31.7 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 96 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Honduras is a Honduran.

The one official language is Spanish. Another 22 entries list Spanish too — among them Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 15th most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for 21% of everyone living in Central America.

The Honduran lempira (HNL) is used only in Honduras 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, Honduras 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 Central America and Honduras sits 2nd of 7 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Guatemala just above and Nicaragua just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇬🇹 Guatemala
• 🇳🇮 Nicaragua
• 🇬🇹 Guatemala

Put next to every other entry on this site, Honduras ranks 103rd of 249 by area and 88th by population. That works out at 0.075% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.13% 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 Honduras in the size ordering are Benin at 112,622 km² and Liberia at 111,369 km², against Honduras's 112,492 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Honduras averages 96 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 120th 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.

Money there is the Honduran lempira (L, HNL). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Honduras.

Websites there use the .hn domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +504. Standard country codes: hn and HND.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Honduras, the answer is Tegucigalpa.

Honduras 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.