Europe is the second-smallest continent but one of the most crowded, with 44 countries and around 745 million people. It is only about 10.2 million square kilometres — smaller than Russia on its own, and about a third the size of Africa. What it lacks in space it makes up for in variety: you can go from a beach in Spain to a glacier in Norway in a few hours on a plane, and cross five countries on a train in a day.
Where Does Europe End?
Europe is not really a separate landmass. It is joined to Asia, and geographers sometimes call the whole thing Eurasia.
The usual dividing line runs down the Ural Mountains in Russia, along the Ural River, across the Caspian Sea and through the Caucasus Mountains to the Black Sea. It is a line people agreed on rather than one nature drew.
That is why some countries are hard to place. Russia and Turkey are in both. Cyprus and Armenia are geographically in Asia and usually counted as European for cultural and political reasons. Depending on who is counting, Europe has between 44 and 51 countries.
The Smallest Countries in the World
Europe holds the six smallest countries on Earth. Vatican City is the smallest at 0.49 square kilometres — about the size of 60 football pitches — with roughly 800 residents.
Monaco is second at 2.1 square kilometres and is the most densely populated country in the world. San Marino, Liechtenstein, Malta and Andorra are next.
San Marino claims to be the oldest republic in the world, founded in 301, and it is entirely surrounded by Italy. Liechtenstein is doubly landlocked, meaning you have to cross two countries to reach the sea from it. There are only two doubly landlocked countries in the world, and the other is Uzbekistan.
Rivers That Cross Countries
The Danube flows through or borders ten countries — more than any other river in the world. It starts in Germany's Black Forest and ends in the Black Sea, passing four capital cities on the way: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade.
The Volga in Russia is Europe's longest at about 3,530 kilometres. The Rhine is the busiest for cargo, carrying barges from Switzerland to the North Sea.
Because European rivers cross borders so often, countries have to cooperate to manage them. The Rhine Commission, set up in 1815, is one of the oldest international organisations in the world and still meets.
The Alps
The Alps run about 1,200 kilometres in an arc through France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Liechtenstein and Monaco. The highest peak is Mont Blanc at 4,808 metres, on the French-Italian border.
They formed the same way the Himalayas did: Africa is pushing north into Europe, and the crust in between has crumpled upwards. It is still happening, though the mountains are also being worn down by ice and weather at roughly the same rate.
The tallest mountain in Europe overall is Mount Elbrus in Russia at 5,642 metres, in the Caucasus — if you count the Caucasus as European, which not everyone does. If you do not, Mont Blanc wins.
Make a European Border Puzzle
Print or draw the outlines of six European countries on card and cut them out — try France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. Now try to fit them together the way they actually sit on the map.
You will notice something: European countries fit together like jigsaw pieces because most of their borders follow rivers, mountains and coastlines rather than straight lines. Compare that with Africa or the United States, where many borders are dead straight because someone drew them with a ruler.
For an extra challenge, look up which country borders the most others in Europe. The answer is Russia and Germany, tied at nine each — though Russia's total includes borders in Asia too.
Islands and Peninsulas
Europe has an unusually crinkly coastline for its size — about 38,000 kilometres of it. That is because so much of the continent is peninsulas: Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, the Balkans, Jutland, Brittany and Crimea all stick out into the sea.
Greece alone has somewhere between 1,200 and 6,000 islands depending on how small a rock has to be before it counts. Around 227 of them are inhabited. Norway's coast is cut by fjords — long deep inlets carved by glaciers — which is why its coastline measures over 25,000 kilometres for a country you can drive across in a few hours.
Iceland is the youngest land in Europe, still being built by volcanoes on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It sits on the boundary between two tectonic plates, and at Thingvellir you can walk between the North American and Eurasian plates, which are pulling apart by about 2 centimetres a year.
Languages
Around 200 to 250 languages are spoken in Europe. The European Union alone has 24 official ones and translates every document into all of them.
Most belong to three families. Romance languages — French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian — come from Latin. Germanic languages include English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian ones. Slavic languages include Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian.
A few fit nowhere. Basque, spoken in northern Spain and south-west France, is not related to any other known language on Earth. Nobody knows where it came from, and it was there before Latin arrived. Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian belong to a different family from all their neighbours.
The European Union
Twenty-seven European countries belong to the European Union, an organisation that lets goods, money and people move between them freely.
Twenty of them use the same money, the euro, so you can travel from Portugal to Finland without changing currency. Twenty-nine countries belong to the Schengen Area, where you can cross borders without a passport check — sometimes the only sign you have changed country is a small blue sign at the roadside.
Not every European country is in the EU. Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are not. The UK left in 2020 after a referendum in 2016.
Landmarks Worth Knowing
The Eiffel Tower in Paris was built for the 1889 world's fair and was meant to be taken down after twenty years. It stayed because it turned out to be useful as a radio antenna, and it is now the most visited paid monument in the world.
The Colosseum in Rome held around 50,000 spectators and is nearly 2,000 years old. Stonehenge in England is older still — around 5,000 years — and nobody is completely sure how the largest stones were moved 25 kilometres, or the smaller ones 250 kilometres from Wales.
The Parthenon in Athens, Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria and the canals of Venice are all worth looking up. Venice is built on around 118 small islands and has no roads at all in its historic centre.
Weather That Should Not Happen
Europe is much warmer than it ought to be for how far north it is. London sits at a higher latitude than Calgary in Canada, and Oslo is further north than Anchorage in Alaska, yet European winters are far milder.
The reason is the Gulf Stream and the wider North Atlantic Current, which carry warm water from the tropics up towards north-west Europe. That warm water heats the air above it, and the prevailing westerly winds blow that air over the continent.
Without it, Britain and Norway would have winters closer to Labrador's. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere of the ocean controlling a continent's climate.
Food That Travelled
Some of the most European-seeming foods are not originally European at all. Tomatoes, potatoes, chillies, chocolate, maize, peppers and vanilla all came from the Americas after 1492.
Italy had no tomato sauce before then, Ireland had no potatoes, Switzerland had no chocolate and Hungary had no paprika. The whole exchange of plants, animals and diseases between the continents is called the Columbian Exchange, and it changed what everybody ate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Going the other way, Europe sent wheat, cattle, horses, pigs, coffee and sugar cane to the Americas. Coffee is not European either, of course — it came from Ethiopia through the Arab world, and Vienna's coffee houses are said to have started with beans left behind by a retreating Ottoman army in 1683.
Small Continent, Long Reach
For a few hundred years, European countries controlled much of the rest of the world through colonial empires. At its largest, in 1920, the British Empire covered about a quarter of the Earth's land and ruled a quarter of its people.
That is why English is spoken in Australia and Nigeria, Spanish across Latin America, Portuguese in Brazil, and French across much of West Africa. Almost all of those empires ended between 1945 and 1975.
Europe's population is now falling in many countries and is the oldest of any continent, with an average age around 44. That is the opposite of Africa, where the average is about 19. To keep exploring, see the full list of countries in Europe and find out about how glaciers carved the Alpine valleys.
