Where in Europe have you been?

A map that's big enough to click Belgium

On a world map, Europe is a crowded corner: Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Montenegro are a few pixels each, and even Belgium and the Netherlands are awkward to hit on a phone. This page frames the same countries as the world map at a size where every one of them is a comfortable target, so you can mark that day trip to Andorra without fighting your thumb.

Anything you mark here appears on your world map too — it's the same data, just a closer view. Russia and Turkey are drawn for context but count under the world map's rules, and the Caucasus states sit on the Asia side of the line.

How many countries is Europe, anyway?

It depends who you ask. The UN counts 44 sovereign states in Europe; add Kosovo, the Vatican, and the transcontinental cases and most travel counts land somewhere between 44 and 50. Our map follows the world map's country list, so the total here is the number you can actually click, and the microstates that Natural Earth doesn't draw at this scale aren't held against you.

The Schengen Area makes Europe the easiest place on Earth to run up a country count: one visa, open borders, and a rail network that puts four or five capitals within a single day's travel. A classic first trip — London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels — is four countries in a week. The harder ones to collect are the ones off the rail map: Iceland, Malta, Cyprus, and the Balkans beyond Croatia, where a car is the way to go.

Microstates and the edge cases

Europe's smallest countries are a checklist within the checklist. Vatican City is a walk across a square in Rome; San Marino a bus ride from Rimini; Monaco a train stop on the Riviera; Liechtenstein a half-hour from Zurich; Andorra a bus up from Barcelona or Toulouse. Some of these are too small for the map to draw at world scale, so they don't all appear as clickable countries here — the count on this page is what the map can actually render. Kosovo is included; Gibraltar, the Faroes, and the Channel Islands count under their parent countries.