San Marino 🇸🇲

Filed under Europe and more precisely Southern Europe, San Marino is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Its capital, City of San Marino, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

Its territory runs to 61 km², which ranks it 233rd of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Guernsey and just ahead of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is about three times the size of Tuvalu.

Some 33,977 people call it home, placing it 221st of 250 by population — between the Marshall Islands above it and the Åland Islands below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 8th of 10 in size and 9th in population.

San Marino 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: Italy has coastline, which makes it the natural gateway 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 San Marino's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in San Marino's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇮🇹 Italy

Its reference point sits at 43.8° north and 12.4° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,872 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

It has exactly one neighbour, Italy, which surrounds it completely. Only a handful of places on earth are enclaved inside a single country like this, and it means every overland route in or out crosses Italy.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. That is true of 45 of the 250 entries here, so all seaborne trade runs through a neighbour's ports. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Put next to every other entry on this site, San Marino ranks 233rd of 250 by area and 221st 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 San Marino in the size ordering are Guernsey at 78 km² and British Indian Ocean Territory at 60 km², against San Marino's 61 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. San Marino averages 557 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 22nd 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.

Spread across 61 km², that works out at about 557 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Sammarinese, so residents are Sammarinese.

Officially it is monolingual: Italian. It shares that with Italy, Switzerland and Vatican City.

Inside Europe it places 50th of 53 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Southern Europe.

San Marino 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. Italian is listed for 4 entries here, San Marino 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 Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

Its internet country code is .sm. To phone it from abroad you dial +378. In ISO terms it is sm in two letters and SMR in three.

As a sovereign state it is among the 193 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.