World Capitals

The capital of every country

A map of world capitals is a map of where countries keep their governments, which is not always where they keep their people. Canberra, Brasília, Abuja, Naypyidaw, and Nur-Sultan — now Astana again — were all built or chosen precisely because they weren't the biggest city. Others are ancient: Damascus and Athens have been capitals, on and off, for more than two thousand years. This map has the capital of every sovereign state, 197 of them, counting the UN members and observers plus Kosovo and Taiwan.

Some countries refuse to have just one. Bolivia's constitutional capital is Sucre but its government sits in La Paz; South Africa splits its branches across Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein; Sri Lanka's parliament is in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, a suburb of the commercial capital Colombo; the Netherlands' constitution names Amsterdam while everything happens in The Hague. For those the map uses the conventional answer and notes the alternative on the badge.

Collecting capitals

Capital cities are usually the easiest place in a country to reach and the place you'll pass through anyway, which is why this list tends to track your country count closely — until it doesn't. Plenty of travelers have been to Australia without Canberra, to Brazil without Brasília, to Turkey without Ankara, to Switzerland without Bern. The badges are grouped by continent, so the gaps show up where you'd expect.

Click a capital badge or its pin to mark it visited, again for want-to-go. The world map tracks the countries themselves, and the US state and Canadian capitals have their own maps.

Capitals that aren't on most lists

The edge cases are where a capital list gets interesting. Naypyidaw, Myanmar's purpose-built capital since 2005, has twenty-lane boulevards and almost no traffic. Ngerulmud in Palau has a population of a few hundred. Yaren is the de facto capital of Nauru, a country with no official capital at all. Jerusalem, Taipei, Pristina, and Ramallah each carry a political argument with them. And several capitals have changed name recently enough to catch people out — Astana has been Astana, Nur-Sultan, and Astana again since 2019, and Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte has been the official capital of Sri Lanka since 1982 despite most maps still saying Colombo.