Mauritius 🇲🇺

Filed under Africa and more precisely Eastern Africa, Mauritius is a sovereign state. The long form of the name is Republic of Mauritius. Port Louis is the capital.

Around 1.2 million people live there, placing it 158th of 249 by population — between Cyprus above it and Eswatini below. Within Eastern Africa alone it is the 16th largest of 20 and the 14th most populous.

By land area it covers 2,040 km², which ranks it 182nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Réunion and just ahead of the Comoros. For scale, it is around a fifth smaller than Luxembourg.

Mauritius 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 Réunion, roughly 230 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 Mauritius's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 20.3° S, 57.5° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,258 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Namibia, New Caledonia and Tonga sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 611 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Mauritian, so residents are Mauritians.

Officially it is multilingual, listing English, French and Mauritian Creole. Mauritian Creole is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Mauritius. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Inside Africa it places 48th of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Mauritius ranks 182nd of 249 by area and 158th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.015% 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 Mauritius in the size ordering are Réunion at 2,511 km² and Comoros at 1,862 km², against Mauritius's 2,040 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Mauritius averages 611 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it one of the most densely settled places on the whole list — 19th 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 Mauritian rupee (MUR) is used only in Mauritius 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. English is listed for 91 entries here, Mauritius 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.

It uses the Mauritian rupee (₨, MUR). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

The top-level domain is .mu. To phone it from abroad you dial +230. In ISO terms it is mu in two letters and MUS in three.

Port Louis is the city to remember for this country.

Mauritius 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.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Mauritius sits 14th of 20 by population and 16th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Eritrea just above and Djibouti 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.

• 🇪🇷 Eritrea
• 🇩🇯 Djibouti
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia