Countries

A landlocked knot of mountains where the roads of Persia, Central Asia, India, and the steppe have crossed for three thousand years.

A small, mountainous country on the Adriatic and Ionian seas that spent the twentieth century sealed off from the world and is now one of the Mediterranean's least-worn corners.

The largest country in Africa — a Mediterranean coastline and cities backed by a vast Saharan interior of dunes, oases, and volcanic mountains.

The eastern Samoan islands, an unincorporated US territory in the South Pacific and the only US soil south of the equator — a place where land is communally held under the chiefly matai system, life follows fa'a Samoa, and people are US nationals but not citizens by birth.

A tiny Pyrenean co-principality between France and Spain, ruled jointly for seven centuries and now living on skiing, hiking, and tax-free shopping.

A large Atlantic-facing country in southern Africa, rich in oil and diamonds, rebuilding after twenty-seven years of civil war, with waterfalls, escarpments, and a desert coast still barely visited.

A long, flat, dry coral island at the northern end of the Leeward Islands, a British Overseas Territory — ringed by white-sand beaches, home to a deliberately low-rise luxury resort scene, and famous for a 1967 "revolution" fought to stay British rather than be ruled from St Kitts.

A twin-island nation in the eastern Caribbean built around deep natural harbours, a Georgian naval dockyard, and a coastline of low-key beaches — famously one for every day of the year.

The second-largest country in South America, running from subtropical falls and high-Andean desert to the wind-scoured glaciers of Patagonia, with a European-inflected culture centred on Buenos Aires.

A small, mountainous republic in the South Caucasus — the first country to adopt Christianity as a state religion, with a diaspora far larger than its own population.

A dry, flat, cactus-strewn island off the coast of Venezuela — a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, outside the hurricane belt, that turned an oil-refining economy into one of the Caribbean's most tourism-dependent.

A barren volcanic island in the equatorial South Atlantic, part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha — never a settled colony but a working base for the military, satellite trackers, seabirds, and turtles, with no right of abode and a population that comes and goes with the jobs.

A continent-sized country of desert interior and coastal cities, home to the world's oldest continuous cultures and to plants and animals found nowhere else.

A small Alpine republic that was once the centre of a vast European empire, now known for classical music, coffeehouses, skiing, and imperial Vienna.

An oil-rich republic on the Caspian Sea where a Turkic, mostly Muslim but strongly secular society meets a landscape of mud volcanoes, ancient fire, and Caucasus peaks.

A small, densely built island kingdom in the Persian Gulf — the site of ancient Dilmun, a former pearling centre, the first Gulf state to strike oil, and now a banking and refining hub linked to Saudi Arabia by causeway.

A vast river delta of some 170 million people — one of the most densely populated countries on Earth — built around Bengali language and culture, and shaped by water, monsoon, and rapid change.

The easternmost Caribbean island — a low cap of coral limestone with calm western beaches and a wild Atlantic coast, an old parliamentary tradition, and a cricket-and-rum culture.

A landlocked country of forest, farmland, and marsh in Eastern Europe — rebuilt from near-total wartime destruction, ruled by one man since 1994, and closely bound to Russia.

A small, densely populated country at the crossroads of Western Europe, split between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, and home to the institutions of the European Union.

A small, thinly populated country on the Caribbean coast of Central America — English-speaking, culturally mixed, and fronted by the longest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere.

A narrow strip of West Africa running from a short Atlantic coast to the Niger River — the historic seat of the Kingdom of Dahomey and the birthplace of Vodun.

A British Overseas Territory of small islands in the North Atlantic, about 1,000 km off the coast of North Carolina and nowhere near the Caribbean — settled from 1609, one of the world's wealthiest places on the strength of international insurance, and known for its pink-sand beaches and pastel cottages.

A Buddhist kingdom in the eastern Himalayas that opened to the outside world only recently, limits tourism by design, and measures itself by Gross National Happiness.

A landlocked country at the heart of South America — the most Indigenous in the Americas — spanning the high Andean Altiplano, the silver mountain of Potosí, and the Amazon lowlands.

A mountainous Balkan country where Ottoman and Central European worlds meet, still shaped by the 1990s war, with Sarajevo's mixed old town and Mostar's rebuilt bridge at its heart.

A sparsely populated, mostly Kalahari country in Southern Africa that turned diamond wealth into stable democracy, and whose Okavango Delta and elephant herds draw a deliberately small, high-end safari trade.

The giant of South America — half the continent, the world's largest rainforest, a Portuguese-speaking nation of some 212 million, and a culture built from Indigenous, African, and European roots.

A cluster of about 60 islands and cays east of Puerto Rico, a British Overseas Territory — the self-styled "sailing capital of the world", one of the largest offshore company-registration centres, and a quieter, more upmarket neighbour to the US Virgin Islands.

A small, oil-rich sultanate on the north coast of Borneo — an absolute monarchy ruled under a national philosophy of Malay Islamic Monarchy, wrapped in some of Asia's best-preserved rainforest.

A Balkan country on the Black Sea with a long Orthodox and Ottoman history, mountain monasteries, Thracian gold, and a coastline of resorts — the European Union's least expensive member.

A landlocked Sahelian country in West Africa, known for its music and film festivals and its mud-brick mosques, now gripped by a jihadist insurgency and military rule.

A small, densely populated country of hills and tea plantations in the African Great Lakes region, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika — among the world's poorest, and slowly emerging from years of political crisis.

A dry volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic off West Africa — a former Portuguese slave-trade waypoint turned stable island democracy, with a Creole culture, the melancholy music of morna, and a diaspora larger than its population.

A Southeast Asian country defined by two things above all — the vast medieval temple city of Angkor, and the memory of the Khmer Rouge years that killed close to a quarter of its people.

A hinge between West and Central Africa often called "Africa in miniature" for its range of landscapes and peoples — bilingual in French and English, football-mad, and troubled by conflict at its edges.

The second-largest country in the world by area, spanning six time zones from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic — a bilingual federation of forests, prairies, mountains, and a handful of large cities near the US border.

Three small islands — Bonaire off the Venezuelan coast, and Sint Eustatius and Saba near Sint Maarten — that are "special municipalities" of the Netherlands proper, not autonomous countries, and that use the US dollar. Bonaire is a diving and flamingo destination; Statia and Saba are tiny, steep, and very quiet.

Three low-lying islands south of Cuba, a British Overseas Territory — a major offshore financial centre and one of the world's wealthiest jurisdictions per head, known for Seven Mile Beach, world-class wall diving, and the absence of direct taxation.

A landlocked country at the heart of the continent — rich in diamonds, gold, and rainforest, among the poorest and least developed nations on Earth, and fractured by more than a decade of armed conflict.

A vast, landlocked country reaching from the Central African rainforest edge to the deep Sahara — oil-exporting but very poor, chronically unstable, and host to some of the continent's largest refugee populations.

A long, narrow ribbon of a country down the western edge of South America — from the driest desert on Earth to Patagonian ice — prosperous and stable by regional standards, and shadowed by the Pinochet years.

The world's most populous country for most of modern history and its second-largest economy — a continent-sized state with a 3,000-year cultural record, ruled since 1949 by the Communist Party.

The only South American country with coasts on both the Caribbean and the Pacific — a land of Andes, Amazon, plains, and colonial cities that has emerged from decades of armed conflict into a confident tourism destination.

A small three-island nation in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar — volcanic, Muslim, French- and Swahili-influenced, coup-prone, and barely touched by tourism.

Fifteen small islands scattered across a vast stretch of the South Pacific, self-governing in free association with New Zealand — a Polynesian country of about 15,000 people, sustained by tourism, fishing licences, and a diaspora many times larger than the resident population.

A small, peaceful Central American country that abolished its army in 1949 and turned its volcanoes, cloud forests, and coastlines into the model for ecotourism.

West Africa's economic powerhouse and the world's largest cocoa producer — a French-speaking country that boomed after independence, fell into civil war in the 2000s, and has rebounded fast.

A crescent-shaped country on the Adriatic, with a long, island-strewn coast of walled stone towns, a mountainous interior, and lakes and waterfalls — now one of Europe's most popular summer destinations.

The largest island in the Caribbean and, since 1959, a one-party socialist state — famous for its music, cigars, vintage American cars, and the faded grandeur of Havana, and shaped by a six-decade US embargo.

The largest of the "ABC" islands off the Venezuelan coast — a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with a UNESCO-listed pastel Dutch waterfront, a hard history as a slave-trade depot, and an oil refinery it is trying to move beyond.

The third-largest island in the Mediterranean and an EU member — Greek-speaking in the south, divided since 1974 by a buffer zone from a Turkish-controlled north, with beaches, ancient ruins, and painted mountain churches.

A landlocked country at the centre of Europe — the historic lands of Bohemia and Moravia — with a thousand-year record of castles, spa towns, and beer, and a capital, Prague, that came through the twentieth century almost unscathed.

The largest country in sub-Saharan Africa — vast, mineral-rich, and covered by the second-biggest rainforest on Earth — shaped by the Congo Free State's atrocities, Mobutu's kleptocracy, and a long war in its east that has never fully ended.

The southernmost Nordic country — a low, tidy peninsula and hundreds of islands — with a long monarchy, a strong welfare state, a design and cycling culture, and a reputation for contentment.

A small, hot, strategically placed country at the mouth of the Red Sea — mostly desert and salt lake, home to foreign military bases and a container port that is its main source of income.

A small, mountainous eastern Caribbean island — the "Nature Isle" — of rainforest, rivers, and volcanic peaks, with a boiling lake, the last surviving Indigenous Caribbean community, and few beaches to speak of.

The larger, more populous share of the island of Hispaniola — site of the first European city in the Americas, now the Caribbean's biggest tourism economy, with baseball, merengue, mountains, and long beaches.

A compact Andean country straddling the Equator, with four sharply different worlds — the Pacific coast, the volcano-lined highlands, the Amazon, and the Galápagos Islands 1,000 kilometres offshore.

The gift of the Nile — a narrow green thread through the desert that carried one of the first and longest-lived civilisations, and today the most populous country in the Arab world.

The smallest and most densely populated country in Central America — a volcanic Pacific strip that came through civil war and years of gang violence, and has drawn attention for a hard-line security crackdown and for adopting Bitcoin.

A small Central African country of a mainland region and volcanic islands — the only Spanish-speaking state in Africa — with large oil wealth, one of the world's longest-ruling governments, and almost no tourism.

A Red Sea country that won independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year war, and has since become one of the world's most closed states — with a modernist Italian-built capital and a long, empty coastline.

The northernmost Baltic state — flat, forested, and dotted with islands and bogs — with a medieval Hanseatic capital, a Finnic language, and a reputation as one of the world's most digital societies.

A small landlocked kingdom between South Africa and Mozambique — one of the world's last absolute monarchies — with a compact range of scenery, wildlife reserves, and strong living traditions.

An ancient highland empire that was never colonised, with its own alphabet, calendar, and church — the second-most-populous country in Africa, and one of its oldest continuously independent states.

A windswept South Atlantic archipelago of two large islands and hundreds of small ones, about 500 km off Argentina — a British Overseas Territory of around 3,700 people, invaded by Argentina in 1982 and retaken in a 74-day war, now living self-sufficiently on fishing, wool, and wildlife tourism.

A cluster of 18 steep, grass-covered islands in the North Atlantic between Scotland, Iceland, and Norway — a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, outside the EU, with about 54,000 people, its own Norse-descended language, and famously changeable weather.

A federation of four island states — Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae — spread across the western Pacific, holding the basalt city of Nan Madol, the wreck-filled Chuuk Lagoon, and Yap's living stone-money culture.

An archipelago of around 330 islands in the South Pacific — the hub of the region — with a mixed Indigenous Fijian and Indo-Fijian society, a history of coups, and a tourism economy built on reefs and resorts.

A sparsely populated Nordic country of forest, tens of thousands of lakes, and a long Arctic north — with a hard-won independence, a distinctive Finno-Ugric language, sauna culture, and a reputation for stability and quiet.

The most visited country in the world — a European heavyweight of Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, alpine and volcanic mountains, wine regions, and a capital that has shaped Western art, food, and politics for centuries.

An overseas department of France on the northeast shoulder of South America — part of the French Republic and the European Union, almost entirely Amazon rainforest, and home to Europe's spaceport at Kourou and a notorious former penal colony.

An overseas collectivity of France spread across five archipelagos in the South Pacific — 118 islands over an ocean area the size of Europe — the home of Tahiti and Bora Bora, and of a Polynesian culture reshaped by missionaries, French rule, and three decades of nuclear testing.

A thinly populated, heavily forested country on the Equator and the Atlantic — oil-rich, ruled for over half a century by one family until a 2023 coup, and home to a network of national parks where forest elephants walk the beaches.

A small country in the South Caucasus where Europe and Asia meet — with its own ancient alphabet and church, a wine tradition thought to be the world's oldest, high mountains, and a fraught relationship with Russia.

Europe's most populous nation and largest economy — a federation of sixteen states unified only in 1871, divided and reunited in the twentieth century, with a landscape of river valleys, forests, and cities rebuilt after the war.

The first sub-Saharan African country to win independence — a stable West African democracy on the Gulf of Guinea, with gold, cocoa, a string of Atlantic slave-trade forts, and a lively music and diaspora culture.

A 6.7-square-kilometre British Overseas Territory on a limestone monolith at the southern tip of Spain, guarding the strait between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean — British since 1704, claimed by Spain, and overwhelmingly determined to stay British.

The southern tip of the Balkans and thousands of islands across the Aegean and Ionian seas — the birthplace of Western democracy, philosophy, and theatre, and one of the Mediterranean's great summer destinations.

The world's largest island — an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, roughly 80% covered by ice, with an Inuit majority, about 57,000 people, and a live debate about eventual independence.

The "Spice Isle" of the southeastern Caribbean — a small volcanic island fragrant with nutmeg and cinnamon, with a horseshoe harbour capital, rainforested peaks, and a short, dramatic brush with Cold War history.

A butterfly-shaped group of Caribbean islands that is an overseas region of France and part of the European Union — a volcanic, rainforested wing and a flat, beach-fringed one, joined by a narrow channel, with a Creole culture and a euro economy.

The largest island in Micronesia and an unincorporated territory of the United States — the indigenous homeland of the CHamoru people, ruled by Spain for over two centuries, occupied by Japan in the Second World War, and now a heavily fortified US military hub known as "the tip of the spear".

The most populous country in Central America and the heartland of the living Maya world — a volcanic highland landscape of colonial towns, lake villages, and jungle temples, shadowed by a long civil war.

A West African country with enormous mineral wealth and the highland "water tower" that feeds the Niger, Senegal, and Gambia rivers — long misruled, and under military government since a 2021 coup.

A small, low-lying West African country of mangrove creeks and the Bijagós Archipelago — a former Portuguese colony with a proud liberation history, chronic political instability, and an economy built on cashews.

An English-speaking country on the shoulder of South America but Caribbean in culture — a thin, populated coastal strip backed by vast rainforest, savanna, and one of the world's most powerful single-drop waterfalls, now transformed by an offshore oil boom.

The western third of Hispaniola — the first nation founded by a successful revolt of enslaved people, with an extraordinary history and culture, and now a state in deep crisis, largely controlled by armed gangs.

A mountainous Central American country with a long Caribbean coast and a short Pacific one — home to the great Maya city of Copán, the cheap-diving Bay Islands on the world's second-largest reef, and a hard recent history of violence and hurricanes.

A dense financial city of some 7.5 million people on the south coast of China — a British colony for 156 years, returned in 1997 under "one country, two systems", and since 2020 a Special Administrative Region whose promised autonomy and civil liberties have been sharply curtailed.

A landlocked country in the Carpathian Basin whose people speak a language unrelated to their neighbours' — with a grand river capital, Europe's richest thermal-spa culture, paprika-laced food, and a defining sense of historical loss.

A young volcanic island in the North Atlantic, straddling two tectonic plates — a landscape of glaciers, geysers, lava fields, and waterfalls, with the world's oldest parliament and a population smaller than many cities.

The world's most populous country and largest democracy — a subcontinent of Himalayan peaks, river plains, deserts, and tropical coasts, and the birthplace of four major religions, held together by extraordinary diversity of language, faith, and food.

The world's largest archipelago — some 17,000 islands strung along the equator on the Pacific Ring of Fire — the fourth-most-populous country and the largest Muslim-majority nation, bound together by one national language.

Ancient Persia — one of the world's oldest continuous civilisations, with a distinct language, a Shia Islamic identity, and a landscape of deserts, mountains, and blue-tiled cities — governed since 1979 as an Islamic Republic.

Ancient Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" where cities and writing began — later the heart of the Abbasid Caliphate — and, after decades of war and sanctions, a fragile country whose autonomous Kurdish north is far more open to visitors than its south.

A green, rain-washed island in the North Atlantic — the Republic covers most of it, with Northern Ireland to the northeast — with a Celtic heritage, a vast global diaspora born of famine and emigration, and a literary and musical tradition out of all proportion to its size.

A small country on the eastern Mediterranean, established in 1948, whose land holds sites central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — a high-tech society and a place of unresolved conflict with the Palestinians and, at times, the wider region.

A Mediterranean peninsula and islands that were the heart of the Roman Empire and the cradle of the Renaissance — unified only in the 1860s, and still a country of fiercely distinct regions, cuisines, and dialects.

The third-largest Caribbean island — mountainous, lush, and culturally enormous for its size, the home of reggae, Rastafari, and a sprinting dynasty, with a resort coast and a wilder, less-visited interior.

An arc of mountainous islands off the coast of East Asia — an ancient imperial culture that spent centuries closed to the world, industrialised at breakneck speed, and now blends deep tradition with hyper-modern cities on a fault-riven, volcanic land.

A small, resource-poor kingdom that has stayed stable in a turbulent region — a land of desert, the Dead Sea, and the rock-cut Nabataean city of Petra, and a refuge for waves of people fleeing neighbouring wars.

The world's largest landlocked country — a vast expanse of steppe, desert, and mountains in Central Asia, once nomadic, then a Soviet testing ground, and now an oil-and-minerals state with a purpose-built futuristic capital.

East Africa's economic hub and its classic safari country — a land spanning the Indian Ocean coast, the Great Rift Valley, snow on the equator at Mount Kenya, and the plains of the Maasai Mara.

A nation of 33 low coral atolls scattered across an ocean area the size of India, straddling the equator and the date line — remote, thinly resourced, and among the most exposed places on Earth to rising seas.

Europe's youngest country — a small, mostly Albanian-populated territory that declared independence from Serbia in 2008, with Ottoman-era towns, medieval Serbian monasteries, and a young, pro-Western population.

A small, very hot, oil-rich emirate at the head of the Persian Gulf — a former pearling port, invaded and liberated in 1990–91, with the Gulf's most powerful elected parliament and a strong tradition of political debate.

A small, almost entirely mountainous country in the Tian Shan of Central Asia — with a living nomadic culture of yurts, horses, and high summer pastures, and the most open borders and turbulent politics in the region.

A landlocked, mountainous country on the Mekong — Southeast Asia's quietest and least developed — with a gilded Buddhist heritage centred on Luang Prabang, and the grim distinction of being the most heavily bombed nation per head in history.

The middle Baltic state — flat, forested, and bog-strewn, on the Baltic Sea — with a Hanseatic capital famous for its Art Nouveau, a language spoken almost nowhere else, and a large Russian-speaking minority.

A small, mountainous Mediterranean country of remarkable religious diversity and cultural energy — once the "Paris of the Middle East," now enduring economic collapse, a shattered political order, and renewed war on its southern border.

A mountain kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa — "the kingdom in the sky," the only country whose land lies wholly above 1,000 metres — built by a nineteenth-century king who chose British protection over absorption.

Africa's oldest republic — founded in 1822 as a settlement for freed African-Americans — with an Atlantic coast of surf beaches and rainforest, still rebuilding from two brutal civil wars and the Ebola epidemic.

A vast, mostly Saharan country on the Mediterranean with some of the finest Roman ruins anywhere — oil-rich, ruled for 42 years by Gaddafi, and since his 2011 overthrow divided between rival governments and militias.

A tiny Alpine principality on the upper Rhine between Switzerland and Austria — one of the world's smallest and richest countries, ruled by a princely family that bought it to gain a seat in the Holy Roman Empire.

The largest and southernmost Baltic state — the last pagan country in medieval Europe, once the centre of a vast Grand Duchy, later partitioned and Sovietised, and now a firmly Western, basketball-obsessed nation.

A small, trilingual grand duchy at the meeting point of Belgium, France, and Germany — a founding member of the European Union, one of the world's wealthiest countries, and built around a fortress city on dramatic river gorges.

A tiny, ultra-dense peninsula and pair of islands on China's south coast — the oldest European settlement in East Asia, Portuguese from the 1550s until 1999, and now a Chinese Special Administrative Region that has become the largest gambling centre in the world.

The world's fourth-largest island, adrift off East Africa for 88 million years — long enough that most of its wildlife lives nowhere else — with a people of Southeast Asian and African origin and a culture built on reverence for ancestors.

A steep, green Atlantic island about 500 km off the coast of Morocco, an autonomous region of Portugal — the first territory of the Age of Discovery, known for its fortified wine, its ancient laurel forest, its network of levada water-channel walks, and a mild "eternal spring" climate.

A small, densely populated country in southeastern Africa wrapped around a vast Rift Valley lake — the "Warm Heart of Africa," poor and largely rural, with clear freshwater, highland massifs, and a scattering of restored wildlife reserves.

A Southeast Asian federation in two halves — the Malay Peninsula and the northern third of Borneo — that blends Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Indigenous cultures, tropical rainforest, and one of the region's more developed economies.

A nation of nearly 1,200 low coral islands strung across the Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka — the flattest and lowest-lying country on Earth, a Muslim republic, and a byword for turquoise-water resort holidays.

A landlocked Sahelian country on the Niger River — the ground of the medieval empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and of fabled Timbuktu — now largely controlled outside its cities by a jihadist insurgency and ruled by a military junta.

A tiny, densely populated archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean between Sicily and North Africa — a fortress island of honey-coloured limestone with a Neolithic, knightly, and British past.

A nation of 29 low coral atolls and five islands scattered across the central Pacific — a great seafaring culture, the site of US nuclear testing in the 1940s and 50s, and one of the countries most exposed to rising seas.

A mountainous Caribbean island that is an overseas region of France and part of the European Union — "the island of flowers", overshadowed in 1902 by the eruption of Mont Pelée, birthplace of the Négritude poet Aimé Césaire, and known for its agricultural rum.

A vast, mostly Saharan country on the Atlantic that bridges the Arab Maghreb and Black West Africa — a land of caravan towns, iron ore, and one of the last places on Earth where hereditary slavery persists.

A volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, ringed by coral lagoons, with no indigenous population — a plural society built by Dutch, French, and British colonisation, African slavery, and Indian indenture, and one of Africa's steadiest democracies.

An island group in the Comoros archipelago that is an overseas department of France and part of the European Union — the poorest part of France, overwhelmingly Muslim, claimed by the neighbouring Union of the Comoros, and struck in December 2024 by the deadliest cyclone to hit French territory in generations.

A vast country between the United States and Central America — heir to the Maya, Aztec, and other civilisations, shaped by Spanish conquest and a bloody revolution, and today the most populous Spanish-speaking nation and a manufacturing power alongside deep inequality.

A small, landlocked country of vineyards and villages between Romania and Ukraine — the old region of Bessarabia, split from Romania by the Soviet Union, now a fast-changing EU candidate with a breakaway Russian-backed region on its eastern edge.

A city-state of two square kilometres on the French Riviera — the world's most densely populated country, ruled by the Grimaldi family since 1297, and built on a casino, a Grand Prix, and the absence of income tax.

A vast, thinly populated country of steppe, desert, and mountains between Russia and China — the heartland of Genghis Khan's empire, and still one of the world's last strongholds of mobile pastoral life.

A small Adriatic country where the Dinaric mountains drop straight into the sea — a highland principality that held out against the Ottomans, spent a century tied to Serbia, and voted for independence in 2006, and is now a NATO member and the frontrunner to join the EU.

A small, mountainous British Overseas Territory in the Leeward Islands — the "Emerald Isle" of the Caribbean for its Irish heritage — with its southern two-thirds, including the former capital of Plymouth, buried and abandoned since the Soufrière Hills volcano came back to life in 1995.

A kingdom of the far northwest of Africa, running from Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts over the Atlas mountains to the Sahara — an Arab and Amazigh society never ruled by the Ottomans, with imperial cities, a living craft tradition, and a powerful monarchy.

A long Indian Ocean country in southeast Africa — a former Portuguese colony that won independence in 1975, endured a 15-year civil war, and now faces an Islamist insurgency in its gas-rich far north alongside recurring cyclones and deep poverty.

A large Southeast Asian country on the Bay of Bengal, also known as Burma — heir to the temple kingdom of Bagan, ruled by the military for most of its independent history, and since a 2021 coup gripped by a nationwide civil war.

A vast, arid country on the southwest coast of Africa — the Namib Desert along the Atlantic, the Kalahari inland, and one of the lowest population densities on Earth — with a German and South African colonial past and a strong conservation record.

A single raised-coral island of 21 square kilometres in the central Pacific — the world's smallest republic, its interior hollowed out by a century of phosphate mining, now living on Australian aid and an offshore detention centre.

A landlocked country wedged between India and China that holds eight of the world's fourteen highest mountains, including Everest — a Hindu-and-Buddhist society of great ethnic variety that abolished its monarchy in 2008 after a decade of civil war.

A low-lying, densely populated country on the North Sea, much of it below sea level and defended by dykes and reclaimed from the water — a former global trading empire, and now a liberal, cycling, trade-based society at the heart of Europe.

A large island and archipelago in the southwest Pacific, French since 1853 — the home of the indigenous Kanak people, holder of about a quarter of the world's nickel, and gripped since 2024 by its worst unrest in decades over the unresolved question of independence.

A pair of large islands in the southwest Pacific, 2,000 kilometres from any neighbour — one of the last places on Earth settled by humans, a bicultural Māori and European society, and a country of mountains, fiords, volcanoes, and coast out of all proportion to its five million people.

The largest country in Central America — a volcanic Pacific strip and a wet Caribbean coast around two great lakes — shaped by US intervention, the Sandinista revolution, and a return to authoritarian rule under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.

A vast, landlocked country of Sahara and Sahel named for the river that waters its far southwest corner — one of the poorest and youngest nations on Earth, and since a 2023 coup ruled by a military junta fighting jihadist insurgencies on two fronts.

The most populous country in Africa — around 230 million people, split roughly between a Muslim north and a Christian south — an oil producer and cultural superpower whose government struggles to deliver security, power, and jobs.

One of the world's smallest self-governing states — a single raised coral island in the South Pacific, in free association with New Zealand, with fewer than 2,000 residents and vastly more Niueans living abroad, ringed by limestone chasms, caves, and some of the clearest water on Earth.

The northern half of the Korean peninsula — a one-party state ruled by the Kim family since 1948, isolated, nuclear-armed, and among the most tightly controlled societies on Earth, where independent travel is impossible and tourism has been all but suspended since 2020.

A small, landlocked country in the central Balkans, home to Orthodox Macedonians and Muslim Albanians — the only Yugoslav republic to leave without war, kept out of NATO and the EU for decades by a name dispute with Greece finally settled in 2018.

A chain of 14 tropical islands north of Guam — a Commonwealth in political union with the United States, home to the CHamoru and Carolinian peoples, fought over ferociously in 1944, and dependent on a tourism economy that has struggled since a garment boom and a casino venture both collapsed.

A long, mountainous country down the Atlantic edge of Scandinavia, cut by fjords and reaching far into the Arctic — a former junior partner of Denmark and Sweden that struck oil in 1969 and turned the wealth into the world's largest sovereign fund.

A sultanate on the southeast corner of Arabia — mountains, desert, and a long Indian Ocean coast — once the seat of a maritime empire that reached Zanzibar, transformed in one 50-year reign from an isolated backwater into a stable, quietly diplomatic modern state.

The fifth-most-populous country in the world — carved out of British India in 1947 as a Muslim homeland — running from the Arabian Sea up the Indus plains to the meeting point of the Karakoram, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush, and ruled in practice by a powerful army.

A small archipelago in the western Pacific, best known for the mushroom-shaped Rock Islands and world-class diving — a matrilineal society, a Second World War battleground, and a global leader in ocean conservation, in free association with the United States.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem — the territory of a Palestinian state recognised by around 145 countries and holding UN observer-state status, under Israeli occupation since 1967, divided politically between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and, since October 2023, the scene of a catastrophic war in Gaza. This page is written to explain the territory, not to encourage travel to it — Gaza is inaccessible and governments warn against much of the West Bank.

The narrow isthmus joining Central and South America, cut through by the canal that links the Atlantic and Pacific — a US-backed breakaway from Colombia in 1903, now a fast-growing, dollarised services economy with a Miami-like capital skyline.

The eastern half of the island of New Guinea plus 600 islands — mountainous, overwhelmingly rural, and the most linguistically diverse country on Earth with some 840 languages — rich in resources that have barely reached a village-based majority.

A landlocked country at the heart of South America, split by its river into fertile east and the vast semi-arid Chaco — bilingual in Spanish and the Indigenous Guaraní, and shaped by a catastrophic 19th-century war and a long 20th-century dictatorship.

A country on the Pacific coast of South America spanning desert, high Andes, and Amazon — the cradle of Andean civilisation and the heart of the Inca Empire, with a celebrated cuisine and a politics in near-permanent crisis.

An archipelago of more than 7,000 islands in Southeast Asia, on the Pacific typhoon belt and Ring of Fire — Asia's largest Catholic-majority country, shaped by three centuries of Spain and half a century of America, and held together by family, faith, and migration.

A single inhabited volcanic speck in the remote South Pacific, the last British Overseas Territory in the Pacific — home to around 35 to 40 people, most descended from the HMS Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians who settled with them in 1790, and reachable only by a multi-day voyage from French Polynesia.

A large country on the North European Plain between Germany and the east — erased from the map for over a century by its neighbours, devastated in the Second World War, and now one of the European Union's fastest-risen economies and Ukraine's foremost backer.

A country on the Atlantic edge of Iberia with some of Europe's oldest borders — once the seat of a global maritime empire, ruled by a long 20th-century dictatorship, and since the 1974 Carnation Revolution a settled, EU-anchored democracy and a booming tourist destination.

A Caribbean island that is an unincorporated territory of the United States — a "Commonwealth" whose 3.2 million people are US citizens but cannot vote for president, shaped by four centuries of Spain and more than a century of America, and still recovering from Hurricane Maria and a long debt crisis.

A small, flat peninsula in the Persian Gulf, ruled by the Al Thani family — a former pearling backwater turned, on the wealth of one of the world's largest gas fields, into one of the richest countries per head, an activist mediator, and the 2022 World Cup host.

A heavily forested oil state straddling the Equator in Central Africa — sometimes called Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from its huge neighbour across the river — with some of the best-protected lowland gorilla habitat left.

A volcanic island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar that is an overseas region of France and part of the European Union — dramatically mountainous, with an active volcano and three vast eroded cirques, and a deeply mixed Creole society built entirely by settlement and indenture.

A country of the Carpathians, the lower Danube, and the Black Sea coast — Latin-speaking in a Slavic and Hungarian neighbourhood, once ruled by the bizarre cult of Ceaușescu, and since a violent 1989 revolution an EU and NATO state on the front line of the war in Ukraine.

The largest country on Earth, spanning eleven time zones from Eastern Europe to the Pacific — heir to the tsarist and Soviet empires, ruled since 2000 by Vladimir Putin, and since 2022 fighting the largest war in Europe since 1945 and cut off from the West by sanctions.

A small, mountainous, densely populated country in the African Great Lakes — the "land of a thousand hills" — that rebuilt from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi into one of the continent's most orderly and fastest-growing states, under the tight rule of Paul Kagame.

A small, dry, hilly island in the northern Leeward Islands, an overseas collectivity of France — once Swedish, now a byword for discreet luxury, with a yacht-filled harbour at Gustavia and a scatter of fine beaches.

A remote volcanic island in the tropical South Atlantic, the main part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha — famous as Napoleon's final place of exile, reachable only by ship until 2017 and now by a weekly flight to one of the most isolated communities on Earth.

A two-island federation in the eastern Caribbean and the smallest sovereign state in the Americas — the first English and French colony in the West Indies, independent since 1983, now living on tourism, finance, and the world's oldest citizenship-by-investment scheme.

A volcanic, rainforested island in the eastern Caribbean, crowned by the twin Piton spires — fought over by France and Britain fourteen times, independent since 1979, and home, from a tiny population, to two Nobel laureates.

A single volcanic main island trailed by a chain of some 30 smaller Grenadine islands and cays — the last stronghold of Caribbean indigenous and Garifuna resistance, and today one of the world's great sailing grounds.

The northern, French side of a small Caribbean island shared with Dutch Sint Maarten — an overseas collectivity of France since 2007, quieter and less commercial than the Dutch half, with long beaches, the capital at Marigot, and a still-visible recovery from Hurricane Irma.

Two main islands and a scatter of islets in the central South Pacific — a cradle of Polynesian settlement, deeply Christian and organised around the chiefly fa'a Samoa system, and the first Pacific island nation to gain independence.

A microstate of 61 square kilometres on and around Monte Titano, entirely surrounded by Italy near the Adriatic — by its own account the world's oldest surviving republic, founded by tradition in 301 AD and independent, more or less continuously, ever since.

Two small volcanic islands straddling the equator in the Gulf of Guinea — the site of the world's first plantation-slavery economy, once the world's largest cocoa producer, now a lush, quiet, Portuguese-speaking ecotourism destination.

The kingdom that occupies most of the Arabian Peninsula — birthplace of Islam and custodian of Mecca and Medina, the world's swing oil producer, an absolute monarchy under the House of Saud, and, since 2016, in the middle of a top-down social and economic overhaul.

The westernmost country of mainland Africa, on the Atlantic, wrapped around The Gambia — a stable democracy, a stronghold of Sufi Islam, and the cultural hub of French-speaking West Africa, now reshaped by a young reformist government and new offshore oil and gas.

A landlocked country at the centre of the Balkans, on the Danube and the old road from Central Europe to Istanbul — the core of the former Yugoslavia, still at odds with Kosovo, an EU candidate that keeps warm ties with Russia and China.

An archipelago of some 115 islands in the western Indian Ocean — ancient granite peaks and low coral atolls, with no indigenous population — a Creole society, one of Africa's richest countries per head, and a byword for luxury beach travel and marine conservation.

A small country on the West African coast, its mountainous capital founded as a settlement for freed slaves — scarred by a brutal 1990s civil war and the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic, and now a peaceful if fragile democracy with fine beaches and rainforest.

An island city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula — a British free port founded in 1819 that became, in one generation after a bruising 1965 independence, one of the world's richest and most tightly governed countries.

The Dutch southern part of a small Caribbean island shared with French Saint-Martin — a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, one of the world's most tourism-dependent economies, still rebuilding from Hurricane Irma in 2017.

A landlocked Central European country of Carpathian mountains and castle-topped hills — part of the Kingdom of Hungary for a thousand years, then of Czechoslovakia, and independent since a peaceful 1993 split.

A small, green country where the Alps, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans meet — Habsburg for centuries, then part of Yugoslavia, and independent since a ten-day war in 1991.

A Melanesian archipelago of some 900 islands east of Papua New Guinea — the setting of the Second World War's Guadalcanal campaign, independent from Britain since 1978, and one of the Pacific's poorest and least-visited nations.

A Horn of Africa nation with the continent's longest mainland coastline — plunged into civil war and statelessness after 1991, and now a fragile federal government backed by an African Union force fighting the al-Shabaab insurgency, while self-governing Somaliland runs the northwest. This page is written to explain the country, not to encourage travel to it — most governments advise against all travel.

The most industrialised economy at Africa's southern tip, and a land of exceptional landscapes and wildlife — ruled by a white-minority apartheid regime until 1994, when Nelson Mandela's election opened a constitutional democracy still shadowed by deep inequality.

A mountainous, densely populated half-peninsula that rose from the ruins of the 1950–53 war into a wealthy democracy and a cultural and technological power — home of Samsung and Hyundai, K-pop and Korean cinema — still formally at war with the North.

The world's youngest country, independent from Sudan in 2011 after Africa's longest civil war — oil-rich but among the poorest and least developed places on Earth, and pushed back toward conflict by a power struggle at the top. This page is written to explain the country, not to encourage travel to it — most governments advise against all travel.

A large country filling most of the Iberian Peninsula — shaped by Roman, Muslim, and Christian rule, once the centre of a global empire, and now a decentralised democracy of strong regional identities, from Catalonia and the Basque Country to Andalusia.

A tear-shaped island off the south of India — a Buddhist civilisation more than two thousand years old, colonised in turn by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, scarred by a 26-year civil war that ended in 2009, and shaken by a economic collapse in 2022.

A vast country where the Blue and White Niles meet, holding more ancient pyramids than Egypt — long ruled from Khartoum by soldiers, split by the secession of South Sudan in 2011, and since April 2023 torn apart by a war between two generals. Most governments advise against all travel.

The smallest sovereign state in South America — a former Dutch colony on the northern "Wild Coast", almost entirely rainforest, with a strikingly plural society of Indian, Javanese, Creole, Maroon, Indigenous, and Chinese communities.

A High Arctic archipelago about midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole — Norwegian sovereign territory governed under a unique 1920 treaty that lets citizens of dozens of countries live and work there without a visa, with polar bears outnumbering the roughly 2,500 people.

The largest Nordic country — a long sweep of forest, lake, and archipelago from the Baltic to the Arctic — historically a European great power, later a byword for social democracy and neutrality, and a NATO member since 2024.

A small, mountainous, landlocked federation at the centre of Europe — four languages, 26 cantons, and a 700-year tradition of direct democracy and armed neutrality — and one of the world's wealthiest countries.

An ancient country at the crossroads of the Levant — home to some of the world's oldest cities and finest ruins — devastated by a civil war that began in 2011, and now in a fragile transition after the fall of the Assad family's 54-year rule in December 2024. This page is written to explain the country, not to encourage travel to it — most governments still advise against all or most travel.

A mountainous island off the coast of China, governed since 1949 by the Republic of China — a vibrant democracy and high-tech economy of 23 million people, claimed by Beijing as a province and recognised as a state by only a handful of governments.

A small, overwhelmingly mountainous country in Central Asia — Persian-speaking, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, scarred by a 1990s civil war, and now a magnet for adventurous travellers drawn to the Pamir Highway and the "Roof of the World".

A large East African country formed by the union of mainland Tanganyika and the islands of Zanzibar — one of the continent's most stable and peaceful states, holding Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti, and Ngorongoro, and bound together by the Swahili language.

A Southeast Asian kingdom of some 70 million people — the only country in the region never colonised by a European power — with a revered monarchy, a politically active military, a devout Buddhist majority, and one of the world's largest tourism industries.

Nine volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic, an autonomous region of Portugal, roughly 1,400 km west of Lisbon — green, wet, and thinly populated, with crater lakes, hot springs, whale-watching, and a long history as a mid-ocean stopover and a source of emigrants.

An archipelago of some 700 low coral islands and cays scattered across clear Atlantic shallows off Florida, with a single busy capital and a scattering of quiet Family Islands.

Mainland Africa's smallest country — a thin ribbon of land following the Gambia River, almost entirely surrounded by Senegal — known for winter-sun beaches, birdlife, and its links to the transatlantic slave trade.

The eastern half of the island of Timor — a former Portuguese colony invaded by Indonesia in 1975, which endured a brutal 24-year occupation before voting for independence in 1999 and becoming fully sovereign in 2002, the first new nation of the 21st century.

A narrow strip of a country running inland from a short Gulf of Guinea coast — ruled by a single family since 1967, a heartland of Vodun (voodoo), and home to the fortress-like earthen tower houses of the Batammariba.

Three tiny coral atolls in the South Pacific, a non-self-governing territory of New Zealand — about 1,500 people with no airport, no capital, and no land more than a few metres above the sea, governed by the councils of elders of each village and reached only by a day-and-a-half boat trip from Samoa.

A Polynesian kingdom of some 170 islands in the South Pacific — the only Pacific nation never formally colonised, still ruled by a monarch, deeply Christian and Sabbatarian, and rebuilding from a massive 2022 volcanic eruption and tsunami.

A twin-island republic just off the coast of Venezuela — Trinidad an industrial, oil-and-gas economy and the birthplace of calypso, soca, and the steelpan; Tobago a quieter tourism island of reefs and rainforest.

The most remote permanently inhabited place on Earth — a single volcanic island in the far South Atlantic, part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha — home to about 240 people who share seven surnames, farm and fish communally, and can be reached only by a six-day boat trip from Cape Town.

The northernmost country in Africa and the smallest of the Maghreb — the land of ancient Carthage, a French protectorate until 1956, socially liberal by regional standards, and the birthplace of the 2011 Arab Spring, now troubled by a slide back toward one-man rule.

A large country spanning Anatolia and a corner of Europe — heir to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, refounded as a secular republic by Atatürk in 1923, a NATO member, and a bridge between Europe and the Middle East governed for two decades by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

A gas-rich Central Asian desert state — one of the most closed and tightly controlled countries in the world, ruled through a personality cult, with a white-marble capital, a permanently neutral foreign policy, and a burning gas crater as its unlikely tourist draw.

Two low limestone island groups at the southeastern end of the Bahamas chain, a British Overseas Territory — built on salt, then long neglected, and since the 1980s transformed by luxury beach tourism centred on Providenciales and the twelve-mile Grace Bay.

A nation of nine tiny coral islands strung across the central Pacific — one of the smallest and least-visited countries on Earth, barely above the sea, and a leading voice on the existential threat of climate change.

A green, landlocked East African country on the equator — the "Pearl of Africa" of Churchill's phrase — holding the source of the Nile, half the world's mountain gorillas, and a long history of turbulent politics under a president in power since 1986.

The largest country wholly within Europe — independent from the Soviet Union since 1991, a democracy that has twice risen against corrupt pro-Russian rule, and since February 2022 fighting a full-scale Russian invasion, the largest war in Europe since 1945. This page is written to explain the country; most governments advise against all travel while the war continues.

A federation of seven Gulf emirates formed in 1971 — oil-rich Abu Dhabi and trade-and-tourism Dubai the best known — where fewer than one in ten residents is a citizen and the rest are workers and professionals from around the world.

A union of four nations — England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — on the islands off northwest Europe; a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, the first industrial nation and once the largest empire in history, and since 2020 outside the European Union.

A federal republic of fifty states spanning a continent — the world's largest economy and a military and cultural superpower, built by Indigenous nations, colonisation, slavery, and waves of immigration, and defined by the wide autonomy of its states.

Three main Caribbean islands east of Puerto Rico — St Thomas, St Croix, and St John — that were the Danish West Indies until the United States bought them in 1917. Their roughly 87,000 people are US citizens who cannot vote for president.

A small, flat country of grassland and coast between Brazil and Argentina — created as a buffer state, an early pioneer of the welfare state and church–state separation, and today one of Latin America's most stable, secular, and socially liberal democracies.

A doubly landlocked country at the heart of Central Asia and of the Silk Road — home to Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva — ruled for 27 years by one strongman, and since 2016 slowly opening up under his successor.

A Y-shaped chain of some 80 volcanic islands in the southwest Pacific — jointly ruled by Britain and France until 1980, extraordinarily diverse in language and custom, and one of the most disaster-exposed countries on Earth.

An oil-rich country on the Caribbean coast of South America, holding the world's largest proven petroleum reserves — the birthplace of Simón Bolívar, transformed by Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution", and since the mid-2010s in economic collapse that has driven nearly eight million people to leave. Most governments advise against most or all travel.

A long, narrow country down the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia — a thousand years under Chinese rule, then dynastic, then French, then split and fought over in a war that ended in 1975 — now a fast-growing, one-party socialist state and a major manufacturing hub.

A small French overseas collectivity in the western Pacific, between Fiji and Samoa — three Polynesian kingdoms under a French administrator, deeply Catholic and custom-bound, and losing people steadily to New Caledonia and mainland France.

A sparsely populated stretch of Atlantic desert south of Morocco, and the last major unresolved decolonisation case in Africa — a former Spanish colony claimed and largely controlled by Morocco, with a smaller zone held by the Polisario Front's self-declared Sahrawi republic and a large refugee population in Algeria.

A country of mountains, desert, and ancient walled cities on the southwest corner of Arabia — once "Arabia Felix", now the poorest Arab state and, since 2014, the site of a civil war and what the UN has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Most governments advise against all travel. The island of Socotra, largely spared the war, sees a trickle of visitors.

A landlocked, copper-rich country on the high plateau of south-central Africa — one of the continent's more stable democracies, shaped by the mining economy and the Zambezi River, and the place where the walking safari was invented.

A landlocked southern African country on the high plateau between the Zambezi and the Limpopo — named after the medieval stone city of Great Zimbabwe, shaped by white-minority rule and a long liberation war, and marked since 2000 by land upheaval and economic crisis.