Mexico 🇲🇽

Filed under the Americas and more precisely North America, Mexico is a sovereign state. The long form of the name is United Mexican States. Its capital, Mexico City, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Some 130.9 million people call it home, placing it 11th of 250 by population — between Ethiopia above it and Japan below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 4th of 7 in size and 2nd in population.

Its territory runs to 1,964,375 km², which ranks it 15th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Saudi Arabia and just ahead of Indonesia. That makes it a little larger than Indonesia.

Spread across 1,964,375 km², that works out at about 67 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

Someone from Mexico is a Mexican.

Officially it is monolingual: Spanish. Spanish is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 23 other entries including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

Inside the Americas it places 3rd of 56 by population, and it accounts for 26% of everyone living in North America.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Mexico ranks 15th of 250 by area and 11th by population. That works out at 1.3% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 1.6% 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 Mexico in the size ordering are Saudi Arabia at 2,149,690 km² and Indonesia at 1,904,569 km², against Mexico's 1,964,375 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Mexico averages 67 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 150th 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 North America and Mexico sits 2nd of 7 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is United States just above and Canada just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇺🇸 United States
• 🇨🇦 Canada
• 🇺🇸 United States

Plotted on a globe it falls at 23.0° north, 102.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,560 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The Tropic of Cancer runs through or very close to it. Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Saudi Arabia, Libya and Myanmar — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 3: Belize, Guatemala and the United States. The largest of them by area is the United States, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 358.9 million people.

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

The Mexican peso (MXN) is used only in Mexico among the 250 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 24 entries here, Mexico 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 Mexican peso ($, MXN). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Mexico.

Its internet country code is .mx. Calls from overseas start with +52. Standard country codes: mx and MEX.

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.