Netherlands 🇳🇱

Filed under Europe and more precisely Western Europe, the Netherlands is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Kingdom of the Netherlands. Government sits in Amsterdam.

It covers 41,850 km², which ranks it 135th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Denmark and just ahead of Switzerland. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Switzerland.

The population is about 18.0 million, placing it 71st of 249 by population — between Guatemala above it and Cambodia below. Among the 8 entries in Western Europe it ranks 3rd by area and 3rd by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 52.5° north, 5.8° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,844 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

2 countries share a land border with it: Belgium and Germany. The largest of them by area is Germany, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 95.4 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 430 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from the Netherlands are called Dutch.

Dutch is the only official language. It shares that with Aruba, Belgium, the Caribbean Netherlands, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Suriname.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 10th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 9.4% of everyone living in Western Europe.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Netherlands ranks 135th of 249 by area and 71st by population. That works out at 0.028% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.22% 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 Netherlands in the size ordering are Denmark at 43,094 km² and Switzerland at 41,284 km², against Netherlands's 41,850 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Netherlands averages 430 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 32nd 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.

Zoom in from the world to Western Europe and Netherlands sits 3rd of 8 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is France just above and Belgium just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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.

• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇧🇪 Belgium
• 🇩🇪 Germany

Netherlands 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. Dutch is listed for 7 entries here, Netherlands 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.

Money there is the Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with the Netherlands.

Websites there use the .nl domain. The international dialling code is +31. Its ISO codes are nl and NLD, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of the Netherlands, the answer is Amsterdam.

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.