Uruguay 🇺🇾

Filed under the Americas and more precisely South America, Uruguay is a sovereign state. Its full official name is Oriental Republic of Uruguay. Government sits in Montevideo.

It covers 181,034 km², which ranks it 91st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Cambodia and just ahead of Suriname. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Belarus.

The population is about 3.4 million, placing it 133rd of 249 by population — between Mongolia above it and Puerto Rico below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 10th of 13 in size and 9th in population.

Its reference point sits at 33.0° south and 56.0° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 3,674 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

2 countries share a land border with it: Argentina and Brazil. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 257.7 million people.

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

Spread across 181,034 km², that works out at about 19 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.

The demonym is Uruguayan, so residents are Uruguayans.

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 21st most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in South America.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Uruguay ranks 91st of 249 by area and 133rd by population. That works out at 0.12% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.042% 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 Uruguay in the size ordering are Cambodia at 181,035 km² and Suriname at 163,820 km², against Uruguay's 181,034 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Uruguay averages 19 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 208th 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 South America and Uruguay sits 9th of 13 by population and 10th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Paraguay just above and Guyana just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇵🇾 Paraguay
• 🇬🇾 Guyana
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

The Uruguayan peso (UYU) is used only in Uruguay among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

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

The currency is the Uruguayan peso ($, UYU). It is issued for Uruguay alone.

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

Its internet country code is .uy. To phone it from abroad you dial +598. In ISO terms it is uy in two letters and URY in three.

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.