Luxembourg 🇱🇺

Luxembourg lies in Western Europe, part of Europe. Its full official name is Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The capital is Luxembourg, the same name as the country, which is the usual sign of a city-state.

The population is about 677,012, placing it 169th of 250 by population — between Macau above it and Suriname below. Among the 8 entries in Western Europe it ranks 6th by area and 6th by population.

It covers 2,586 km², which ranks it 181st of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Samoa and just ahead of Réunion. That makes it about a quarter the size of Cyprus.

Luxembourg has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: Germany, France and Belgium have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Luxembourg's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Luxembourg's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇧🇪 Belgium

Its reference point sits at 49.8° north and 6.2° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,538 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Kazakhstan.

3 countries share a land border with it: Belgium, France and Germany. The largest of them by area is France, while the most populous is Germany. Together those neighbours hold about 163.9 million people.

Luxembourg is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 250 entries here, and it means every shipment in or out has to cross someone else's border first. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Luxembourg ranks 181st of 250 by area and 169th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 250 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent 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 Luxembourg in the size ordering are Samoa at 2,842 km² and Réunion at 2,511 km², against Luxembourg's 2,586 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Luxembourg averages 262 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 55th 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.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 262 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing French, German and Luxembourgish. Luxembourgish is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Luxembourg. French, the first listed, is shared with 45 other entries worldwide.

People from Luxembourg are called Luxembourgers.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 38th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Western Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Western Europe and Luxembourg sits 6th of 8 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Switzerland just above and Liechtenstein just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇭 Switzerland
• 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein
• 🇩🇪 Germany

Luxembourg 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. French is listed for 46 entries here, Luxembourg 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 Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Luxembourg.

The top-level domain is .lu. The international dialling code is +352. Its ISO codes are lu and LUX, 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.