Western Sahara 🇪🇭

Western Sahara lies in Northern Africa, and it is a disputed territory claimed by both Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and listed by the UN as non-self-governing. The long form of the name is Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. The capital is El Aaiún.

Some 600,000 people call it home, placing it 172nd of 250 by population — between Montenegro above it and Malta below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 6th of 7 in size and 7th in population.

Its territory runs to 266,000 km², which ranks it 79th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Gabon and just ahead of Guinea. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as New Zealand.

Western Sahara does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 193 member states while still appearing among the 250 entries on this site.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Western Sahara 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 currencyDZD, MAD, MRU
• Its own dialling code+2
• Its own internet domain.eh
• Its own ISO codeseh / ESH
• A designated capitalEl Aaiún

Plotted on a globe it falls at 24.5° north, 13.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,727 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

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

Its land neighbours number 3: Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco. The largest of them by area is Algeria, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 90.1 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 2.3 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Berber, Hassaniya and Spanish. Hassaniya is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Western Sahara. Berber, the first listed, is shared with 1 other entry worldwide.

People from Western Sahara are called Sahrawis.

Inside Africa it places 53rd of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Northern Africa.

Western Sahara does not have the Algerian dinar to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is DZD, and the other one is 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 DZD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Spanish is listed for 24 entries here, Western Sahara 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 Northern Africa, Western Sahara is the least populous of the 7 entries listed here, and 6th by area. Libya 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.

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

• 🇱🇾 Libya
• 🇪🇬 Egypt

More than one currency circulates: Algerian dinar (DZD), Moroccan dirham (MAD) and Mauritanian ouguiya (MRU). It shares that currency with Algeria.

Websites there use the .eh domain. Its ISO codes are eh and ESH, which is what most databases and flag files use.

El Aaiún is the city to remember for this territory.

Western Sahara does not hold a seat at the United Nations, but it is not a dependency of another state either: it is a disputed territory claimed by both Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and listed by the UN as non-self-governing. That is why it appears among the 250 entries on this site while the familiar count of UN member states stops at 193. Where a figure depends on that distinction, this site says which rule it used rather than quietly picking one.