Spain 🇪🇸

Spain is a sovereign country in Southern Europe, in the wider region of Europe. The long form of the name is Kingdom of Spain. The capital is Madrid.

Some 48.8 million people call it home, placing it 32nd of 249 by population — between Uganda above it and Algeria below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 1st of 10 in size and 2nd in population.

Its territory runs to 505,992 km², which ranks it 53rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Thailand and just ahead of Turkmenistan. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Thailand.

Its reference point sits at 40.0° north and 4.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,453 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

The prime meridian also passes close to it, so it straddles the line that divides east from west. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include the United States, Türkiye and Turkmenistan.

5 countries share a land border with it: Andorra, France, Gibraltar, Portugal and Morocco. The largest of them by area is France, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 117.4 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 97 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Spanish is the only official language. Spanish is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 22 other entries including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Someone from Spain is a Spanish.

Inside Europe it places 6th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 37% of everyone living in Southern Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Europe and Spain sits 2nd of 10 by population and 1st by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Italy just above and Portugal just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇮🇹 Italy
• 🇵🇹 Portugal
• 🇮🇹 Italy

Spain 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. Spanish is listed for 23 entries here, Spain 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Spain ranks 53rd of 249 by area and 32nd by population. That works out at 0.34% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.60% 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 Spain in the size ordering are Thailand at 513,120 km² and Turkmenistan at 488,100 km², against Spain's 505,992 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Spain averages 97 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 119th 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 Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Spain, the answer is Madrid.

Its internet country code is .es. The international dialling code is +34. Standard country codes: es and ESP.

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.