Madagascar 🇲🇬

Madagascar is a country in Eastern Africa, one of the 20 entries this site files under that subregion. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Madagascar. Its seat of government is Antananarivo.

It is home to roughly 32.0 million people, placing it 49th of 249 by population — between Peru above it and Ivory Coast below. Among the 20 entries in Eastern Africa it ranks 6th by area and 6th by population.

The land area is 587,041 km², which ranks it 47th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Ukraine and just ahead of Botswana. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Kenya.

Madagascar has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Mayotte, roughly 820 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Madagascar's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 20.0° south, 47.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,226 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The Tropic of Capricorn passes across it. Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach New Caledonia, Fiji and Tonga — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It shares no land border with anyone. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Density comes out at around 54 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.

The demonym is Malagasy, so residents are Malagasys.

It recognises 2 languages: French and Malagasy. Malagasy is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Madagascar. French, the first listed, is shared with 45 other entries worldwide.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 15th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 6.5% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Madagascar ranks 47th of 249 by area and 49th by population. That works out at 0.39% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.39% 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 Madagascar in the size ordering are Ukraine at 603,500 km² and Botswana at 582,000 km², against Madagascar's 587,041 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Madagascar averages 54 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 161st 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.

The Malagasy ariary (MGA) is used only in Madagascar 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, Madagascar 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.

The currency is the Malagasy ariary (Ar, MGA). It is issued for Madagascar alone.

Antananarivo is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Its internet country code is .mg. To phone it from abroad you dial +261. In ISO terms it is mg in two letters and MDG in three.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Madagascar sits 6th of 20 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Mozambique just above and Malawi just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇲🇿 Mozambique
• 🇲🇼 Malawi
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia