Lesotho 🇱🇸

Lesotho is a sovereign country in Southern Africa, in the wider region of Africa. Its full official name is Kingdom of Lesotho. Its seat of government is Maseru.

It is home to roughly 2.3 million people, placing it 146th of 249 by population — between Albania above it and Guinea-Bissau below. Among the 5 entries in Southern Africa it ranks 4th by area and 4th by population.

The land area is 30,355 km², which ranks it 142nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Belgium and just ahead of Armenia. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Belgium.

Lesotho 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 has coastline, which makes it the natural gateway 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 Lesotho's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Lesotho's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇿🇦 South Africa

Plotted on a globe it falls at 29.5° south, 28.5° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 3,284 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Chile and Norfolk Island — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It has exactly one neighbour, South Africa, which surrounds it completely. Only a handful of places on earth are enclaved inside a single country like this, and it means every overland route in or out crosses South Africa.

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, Lesotho ranks 142nd of 249 by area and 146th by population. That works out at 0.020% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.029% 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 Lesotho in the size ordering are Belgium at 30,528 km² and Armenia at 29,743 km², against Lesotho's 30,355 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Lesotho averages 77 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 135th 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.

Density comes out at around 77 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 multilingual, listing English and Sotho. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Someone from Lesotho is a Mosotho.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 45th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 3.2% of everyone living in Southern Africa.

Lesotho 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, Lesotho 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: Lesotho loti (LSL) and South African rand (ZAR). It is issued for Lesotho alone.

Maseru is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .ls. The international dialling code is +266. Standard country codes: ls and LSO.

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.