Monaco 🇲🇨

Filed under Europe and more precisely Western Europe, Monaco is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Principality of Monaco. Its capital, Monaco, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Some 38,631 people call it home, placing it 218th of 249 by population — between Gibraltar above it and the Marshall Islands below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 8th of 8 in size and 8th in population.

Its territory runs to 2.02 km², which ranks it 248th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Gibraltar and just ahead of Vatican City. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is some 5 times the size of Vatican City.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Monaco ranks 248th of 249 by area and 218th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent 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 Monaco in the size ordering are Gibraltar at 6 km² and Vatican City at 0 km², against Monaco's 2 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Monaco averages 19,124 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it one of the most densely settled places on the whole list — 2nd 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.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 43.7° north, 7.4° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,868 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

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

It borders 1 neighbour: France.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Density comes out at around 19,124 people per square kilometre, which makes it among the most densely populated places on earth. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: French. French is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 45 other entries including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

The demonym is Monegasque, so residents are Monegasques.

Inside Europe it places 49th of 53 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Western Europe.

Within Western Europe, Monaco is the least populous of the 8 entries listed here, and 8th by area. Liechtenstein is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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

• 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein
• 🇩🇪 Germany

Monaco does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, 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 EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Monaco 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 Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

The top-level domain is .mc. To phone it from abroad you dial +377. In ISO terms it is mc in two letters and MCO in three.

Monaco 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.