Panama 🇵🇦

Panama is a sovereign country in Central America, in the wider region of the Americas. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Panama. The capital is Panama City, the same name as the country, which is the usual sign of a city-state.

It covers 75,417 km², which ranks it 119th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Czechia and just ahead of Sierra Leone. That makes it a little larger than Ireland.

The population is about 4.5 million, placing it 128th of 249 by population — between Kuwait above it and Croatia below. Among the 7 entries in Central America it ranks 4th by area and 6th by population.

Its reference point sits at 9.0° north and 80.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,002 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Ethiopia, Nigeria and Somalia.

It borders 2 neighbours: Colombia and Costa Rica. The largest of them by area is Colombia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 58.0 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 60 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Panama is a Panamanian.

The one official language is Spanish. Another 22 entries list Spanish too — among them Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 20th most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for 8.6% of everyone living in Central America.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Panama ranks 119th of 249 by area and 128th by population. That works out at 0.050% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.056% 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 Panama in the size ordering are Czechia at 78,865 km² and Sierra Leone at 71,740 km², against Panama's 75,417 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Panama averages 60 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 158th 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 Central America and Panama sits 6th of 7 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Costa Rica just above and Belize just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇷 Costa Rica
• 🇧🇿 Belize
• 🇬🇹 Guatemala

Panama does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 19 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, 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 USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Spanish is listed for 23 entries here, Panama 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.

More than one currency circulates: Panamanian balboa (PAB) and United States dollar (USD). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Websites there use the .pa domain. The international dialling code is +507. Standard country codes: pa and PAN.

Panama 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.