🇪🇭 Western Sahara

Where is Western Sahara?

Western Sahara lies in Northern Africa, on the continent of Africa.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 2 727 km from the equator.

Its coastline is about 1 110 km long.

It shares a border with 3 countries: Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco.

How big is Western Sahara?

Western Sahara covers 266 000 square kilometres.

That is about 6.4 times the size of Switzerland.

If everybody spread out evenly, there would be about 2.5 people on every square kilometre.

Who lives in Western Sahara?

About 652 thousand people live in Western Sahara.

People here speak Berber, Hassaniya and Spanish.

They pay with the Algerian dinar (دج).

On average, people born here can expect to live about 50 years.

The land of Western Sahara

The land in Western Sahara sits on average 256 metres above sea level.

Its coast runs for about 1 110 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 56 days.

It lies between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes Western Sahara different?

Websites from here often end in .eh.

Western Sahara and the rest of the world

Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0.1 live in Western Sahara.

It takes up about 0.2 % of all the land that countries stand on.

That is emptier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.

Western Sahara and its neighbours

Algeria, its largest neighbour, is about 9 times bigger.

Algeria has more people: 42.2 million against 652 thousand.

A country, or a territory?

Western Sahara is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.

That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.

On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.

Its nearest neighbour by land is Algeria.