The 45 capitals of Europe

Europe fits more countries into less space than any continent except Africa, and the capitals come with it: 45 of them, from Reykjavík at the top of the Atlantic to Valletta on a rock in the middle of the Mediterranean.

A few are famously not what people guess. Switzerland's is Bern, not Zurich or Geneva — and strictly it is a "federal city" rather than a capital, since the Swiss constitution names none. The Netherlands is the one country here where the capital and the government sit in different cities: Amsterdam is written into the constitution, while parliament, the ministries and the king's working palace are all in The Hague.

The small end of the list is small indeed. Vatican City is a country, a capital and a walled district of another capital all at once; Monaco is a city-state, so its capital is itself; and San Marino's is called City of San Marino, sitting on a mountain inside Italy. Between them they hold fewer people than a mid-sized town.

Two absences are worth naming. Nicosia — the last divided capital in Europe, with a UN buffer zone running through it — is missing because Cyprus is filed in Asia, which is where the map data puts it. Ankara and the Turkish capitals are absent for the same reason. Kosovo's Pristina is here: it is not governed from another country's capital, however disputed its status, and the same line puts Taiwan and Western Sahara among the countries too.

Quiz yourself on all 45 →

Countries are grouped by continent the way the app groups them (Natural Earth), so the table matches exactly what the quiz asks. Capitals from the mledoze/countries dataset, except Pristina, which the two datasets' country codes cannot join on. Population from Natural Earth, carrying the year of each estimate.