Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼

Guinea-Bissau is a country in Western Africa, one of the 17 entries this site files under that subregion. The long form of the name is Republic of Guinea-Bissau. Its capital, Bissau, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Some 2.2 million people call it home, placing it 148th of 250 by population — between Lesotho above it and Slovenia below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 14th by area and 15th by population.

Its territory runs to 36,125 km², which ranks it 140th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Taiwan and just ahead of Moldova. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a fraction smaller than Switzerland.

Its reference point sits at 12.0° north and 15.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,336 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Somalia, the Philippines and Cambodia.

It borders 2 neighbours: Guinea and Senegal. The largest of them by area is Guinea, while the most populous is Senegal. Together those neighbours hold about 33.3 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 61 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

2 languages carry official status: Portuguese and Upper Guinea Creole. Upper Guinea Creole is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Guinea-Bissau. Portuguese, the first listed, is shared with 9 other entries worldwide.

People from Guinea-Bissau are called Guinea-Bissauans.

Inside Africa it places 46th of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Guinea-Bissau ranks 140th of 250 by area and 148th by population. That works out at 0.024% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.027% 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 Guinea-Bissau in the size ordering are Taiwan at 36,193 km² and Moldova at 33,846 km², against Guinea-Bissau's 36,125 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Guinea-Bissau averages 61 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 157th of the 248 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 Africa and Guinea-Bissau sits 15th of 17 by population and 14th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Gambia just above and Cape Verde just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇬🇲 Gambia
• 🇨🇻 Cape Verde
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Guinea-Bissau does not have the West African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 8 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XOF, 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 XOF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Portuguese is listed for 10 entries here, Guinea-Bissau 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.

It uses the West African CFA franc (Fr, XOF). That is a shared currency: 7 other entries use it, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Niger.

The top-level domain is .gw. The international dialling code is +245. Its ISO codes are gw and GNB, which is what most databases and flag files use.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 193 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.