Every National Capital on Earth

What the colours mean

Each capital is tinted — and sized — by its population. The ramp runs from cool to hot as the city grows: most capitals are in the one-to-five-million band, and the map is built so the giants stand out — a cluster always takes the colour of its largest capital, so a single mega-capital will set a whole regional bloom glowing red.

What makes a city a capital in the first place — why some countries have two or even three, and why a capital isn’t always the biggest city — is worth a couple of minutes:

The biggest capitals

The most populous seats of government on Earth — sprawling megacities that are also the political heart of their nation. Open a country for its capital (or capitals) and how they compare.

About this data

Capitals, their locations and their populations come from Wikidata, the open, CC0 knowledge base. We map the capital city of every present-day country that carries an international (ISO) country code, and colour and size it by population. A handful of countries have more than one capital — South Africa has three (Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein, the seats of its executive, legislature and judiciary), and Bolivia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Eswatini and Palestine each have two — and every one is shown. Population figures are the most recent recorded for the city proper, not the wider metropolitan area, which is why a familiar capital can look smaller here than you expect; one or two capitals have no population recorded at all, and we say so rather than invent a number. This is a map of where the world is governed from, not a ranking. As community-maintained data it is broad but imperfect; we refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling Wikidata on every visit.