Vatican City 🇻🇦

Vatican City is a sovereign city-state whose government, the Holy See, sits at the UN as a permanent observer rather than a member. That is why it appears among the 250 entries here but not among the 193 UN member states: the two lists answer different questions, and neither one is simply "the countries of the world".

Recognition is a political fact rather than a geographic one, and it is not all-or-nothing — a state can hold a seat at some international bodies, issue its own passports and run its own currency while a portion of the world declines to recognise it. Judge the practical questions on their own evidence rather than on the UN membership list alone.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Vatican City has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyEUR
• Its own dialling code+3
• Its own internet domain.va
• Its own ISO codesva / VAT
• A designated capitalVatican City

Filed under Southern Europe, Vatican City is a sovereign city-state whose government, the Holy See, sits at the UN as a permanent observer rather than a member. Treaties and official documents call it Vatican City State. The capital is Vatican City, the same name as the country, which is the usual sign of a city-state.

The land area is 0.44 km², which ranks it 250th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — the smallest on the list, behind Monaco. That makes it roughly a 5th of the size of Monaco.

Its recorded population is just 800, among the smallest anywhere. Among the 10 entries in Southern Europe it ranks 10th by area and 10th by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 41.9° north, 12.4° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,664 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

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, 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.

Density comes out at around 1,818 people per square kilometre, which makes it among the most densely populated places on earth. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

2 languages carry official status: Italian and Latin. Latin is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Vatican City. Italian, the first listed, is shared with 3 other entries worldwide.

Someone from Vatican City is a Vatican.

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

Vatican City 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, Vatican City 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.

Within Southern Europe, Vatican City is the least populous of the 10 entries listed here, and 10th by area. San Marino is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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

• 🇸🇲 San Marino
• 🇮🇹 Italy