Mozambique 🇲🇿

Mozambique is an independent state in Eastern Africa, and a member of the United Nations. Its full official name is Republic of Mozambique. Government sits in Maputo.

The population is about 34.6 million, placing it 46th of 250 by population — between Saudi Arabia above it and Ghana below. Within Eastern Africa alone it is the 3rd largest of 20 and the 5th most populous.

The land area is 801,590 km², which ranks it 37th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Namibia and just ahead of Türkiye. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Türkiye.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 18.3° S, 35.0° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,032 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Bolivia, Fiji and Tonga sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

It borders 6 neighbours: Malawi, South Africa, Eswatini, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The largest of them by area is South Africa, while the most populous is Tanzania. Together those neighbours hold about 193.4 million people.

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

Spread across 801,590 km², that works out at about 43 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

The one official language is Portuguese. Another 9 entries list Portuguese too — among them Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea.

People from Mozambique are called Mozambicans.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 13th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 7.1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Mozambique sits 5th of 20 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Uganda just above and Madagascar just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇺🇬 Uganda
• 🇲🇬 Madagascar
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

The Mozambican metical (MZN) is used only in Mozambique 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. Portuguese is listed for 10 entries here, Mozambique 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Mozambique ranks 37th of 250 by area and 46th by population. That works out at 0.53% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.43% 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 Mozambique in the size ordering are Namibia at 825,615 km² and Türkiye at 783,562 km², against Mozambique's 801,590 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Mozambique averages 43 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 176th 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.

It uses the Mozambican metical (MT, MZN). It is issued for Mozambique alone.

The top-level domain is .mz. To phone it from abroad you dial +258. Its ISO codes are mz and MOZ, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Maputo is the city to remember for this country.

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.