Morocco 🇲🇦

Filed under Africa and more precisely Northern Africa, Morocco is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Kingdom of Morocco. Government sits in Rabat.

It covers 446,550 km², which ranks it 59th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Uzbekistan and just ahead of Iraq. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Sweden.

The population is about 38.1 million, placing it 39th of 249 by population — between Yemen above it and Angola below. Within Northern Africa alone it is the 5th largest of 7 and the 4th most populous.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 32.0° N, 5.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,562 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

Its land neighbours number 3: Algeria, Western Sahara and Spain. The largest of them by area is Algeria, while the most populous is Spain. Together those neighbours hold about 96.3 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 85 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Morocco is a Moroccan.

It recognises 2 languages: Arabic and Berber. Arabic, the first listed, is shared with 24 other entries worldwide.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 11th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 14% of everyone living in Northern Africa.

Morocco does not have the Moroccan dirham to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is MAD, 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 MAD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Morocco 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 Northern Africa and Morocco sits 4th of 7 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Algeria just above and Tunisia just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇩🇿 Algeria
• 🇹🇳 Tunisia
• 🇪🇬 Egypt

Put next to every other entry on this site, Morocco ranks 59th of 249 by area and 39th by population. That works out at 0.30% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.47% 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 Morocco in the size ordering are Uzbekistan at 447,400 km² and Iraq at 438,317 km², against Morocco's 446,550 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Morocco averages 85 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 127th 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 Moroccan dirham (د.م., MAD). It is issued for Morocco alone.

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

Its internet country code is .ma. The international dialling code is +212. Standard country codes: ma and MAR.

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.