Mauritania 🇲🇷

Mauritania is an independent state in Western Africa, and a member of the United Nations. The long form of the name is Islamic Republic of Mauritania. The capital is Nouakchott.

Some 5.2 million people call it home, placing it 125th of 249 by population — between Oman above it and Costa Rica below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 3rd by area and 13th by population.

Its territory runs to 1,030,700 km², which ranks it 30th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Bolivia and just ahead of Egypt. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Egypt.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 20.0° N, 12.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,226 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

It is one of the countries that the Tropic of Cancer crosses. India, Myanmar and Oman sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

4 countries share a land border with it: Algeria, Mali, Senegal and Western Sahara. The largest of them by area is Algeria, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 90.4 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 5.0 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Mauritania is a Mauritanian.

The one official language is Arabic. Arabic is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 24 other entries including Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

Inside Africa it places 39th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 1.1% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Mauritania does not have the Mauritanian ouguiya to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is MRU, and the other one is 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 MRU travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Mauritania 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 Western Africa and Mauritania sits 13th of 17 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Liberia just above and Gambia 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.

• 🇱🇷 Liberia
• 🇬🇲 Gambia
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Put next to every other entry on this site, Mauritania ranks 30th of 249 by area and 125th by population. That works out at 0.69% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.064% 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 Mauritania in the size ordering are Bolivia at 1,098,581 km² and Egypt at 1,002,450 km², against Mauritania's 1,030,700 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Mauritania averages 5 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it among the emptiest places on the list — 229th 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 currency is the Mauritanian ouguiya (UM, MRU). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Mauritania.

Nouakchott is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .mr. To phone it from abroad you dial +222. Standard country codes: mr and MRT.

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.