Ethiopia covers about 1,104,300 km² (426,400 sq mi), making it the 26th-largest country in the world and the tenth-largest in Africa. It is roughly 1.7 times the size of France, about four and a half times the size of the United Kingdom and a little larger than Egypt. Measured on the map, the country stretches about 1,650 km from its western edge on the Pibor River to its eastern tip in the Somali Region, and about 1,250 km from the Mareb River in Tigray to the Kenyan border at Moyale. With around 138 million people as of 2026, it is also the most populous landlocked country on Earth.
Land, Water and a Ranking Between Colombia and Bolivia
Of Ethiopia’s total area, about 1,096,570 km² is land and some 7,730 km² is inland water, less than one per cent of the whole. In the global ranking it sits between Colombia (1,138,910 km²) and Bolivia (1,098,581 km²). Within Africa only Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Libya, Chad, Niger, Angola, Mali and South Africa are larger.
Ethiopia is about 1.6 times the size of Texas and almost twice the size of Kenya. It is around 100,000 km² larger than Egypt, a gap about the size of Iceland. Crossing the country says more than any comparison, because the same territory runs from salt flats below sea level to plateaus above 4,000 m. The journeys below go from edge to edge of the map, first north to south, then west to east.
North to South: From the Mareb River Bend to Moyale
Ethiopia’s northernmost point is a bend in the Mareb River in the Tigray Region, at 14°53′N, where the river forms part of the border with Eritrea. Its southernmost point is an unnamed spot on the Kenyan border in the Somali Region, near a hill just east of the Kenyan town of Moyale, at roughly 3.5°N. That gives a north–south span of more than 11 degrees of latitude, roughly 1,250 km in a straight line.
A traveller covering that distance would cross almost every kind of Ethiopian landscape. The north is the high, broken country of Tigray and the Amhara Region, where the Simien Mountains culminate in Ras Dashen. Lake Tana, Ethiopia’s largest lake, covers 3,000 to 3,500 km² depending on the season and feeds the Blue Nile (the Abay), which cuts a deep gorge through the plateau on its way to Sudan. Further south lies Addis Ababa, at the foot of Mount Entoto at about 2,355 m, a few kilometres west of the Great Rift Valley. The Rift then runs south-west as a chain of lakes between two highland blocks, before the plateau drops away on its southern escarpment towards Lake Turkana and the Borana Plateau around Moyale, the main border post on the road to Nairobi.
Distance on the ground is greater than distance on the map, because the plateau is cut by deep valleys. Rivers rising on the uplands have carved gorges whose walls in places stand only two or three hundred metres apart and drop almost vertically for hundreds of metres, leaving flat-topped hills called ambas standing between them. The Abay itself rises near Mount Denguiza in the Choqa Mountains, flows about 110 km north into Lake Tana, then leaves the lake and loops across north-western Ethiopia through gorges up to about 1,500 m deep, so a road journey north from Addis Ababa means descending into the Blue Nile Gorge and climbing out again. Lake Tana and its surroundings were recognised as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2015.
West to East: From the Pibor River to the Ogaden
The west–east crossing is even longer. The westernmost point is a bend in the Pibor River at 33°E, opposite the South Sudanese village of Denjok in the Gambela Region. Gambela is a low, flat region at 400 to 550 m above sea level, drained by the Baro, Akobo and other rivers that join to form the Sobat, a tributary of the White Nile. It has only about 525,000 inhabitants on roughly 29,783 km².
Heading east, the land climbs through the forested south-west into the highlands, past the Rift Valley and up again into the Bale Mountains, where Tullu Demtu reaches 4,377 m, the second-highest peak in the country. Beyond Bale the plateau slopes down into the Somali Region, the dry lowland plains often called the Ogaden, with its capital at Jijiga. Ethiopia ends at the point of a triangular section of the Somali border at 8°N, 48°E. From 33°E to 48°E is 15 degrees of longitude, which at that latitude works out to about 1,650 km.
Ethiopia’s rivers mostly run west, away from this long eastern slope. The Tekezé, the Abay and the Sobat system drain the highlands to the Nile, and the Ethiopian uplands supply around 85 per cent of the Nile’s water. That is why the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, built on the Blue Nile between 2011 and 2025 in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region close to the Sudanese border, matters so much downstream. The Omo flows south into Lake Turkana over a course of 600 to 760 km, depending on the source, and the Awash winds north-east for somewhere between 800 and 1,200 km before disappearing into Lake Abbe on the Djibouti border without ever reaching the sea.
Down and Up: The Danakil Depression to Ras Dashen
Ethiopia’s size is vertical as well as horizontal. The highest point is Ras Dashen, also written Ras Dejen, at 4,550 m (14,928 ft) in the Simien Mountains National Park in the Amhara Region. The highlands it crowns are a plateau mostly between about 1,290 and 3,000 m, with some 25 summits above 4,000 m, and most of Ethiopia’s major cities, including the historic capitals Gondar and Axum, sit at 2,000 to 2,500 m.
The lowest point is in the Afar Region, in the Danakil Depression, about 125 m below sea level. The depression is roughly 200 km long and 50 km wide and lies in the northern part of the Afar Triangle, where the Nubian plate and the Danakil microplate are pulling apart by up to about 18 mm a year. Between Ras Dashen and the Danakil floor there is a vertical difference of about 4,675 m, and the two points are only a few hundred kilometres apart.
The climate follows the altitude. Dallol, in the Danakil, holds the record for the highest average temperature of any inhabited place, 34 to 35 °C (93 to 95 °F) depending on the source, while Addis Ababa, about 600 km to the south-west, has mild weather all year and about 1,200 mm of rain. For a closer look at the high ground that dominates the country, see our guide to the geography of the Ethiopian Highlands.
Six Neighbours and About 5,900 km of Land Border
A country this broad has a long perimeter. Ethiopia borders six countries: Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the north-east, Somalia to the east and south-east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west and Sudan to the north-west. Using the border lengths in the CIA World Factbook figures that Wikipedia reproduces, the total comes to about 5,926 km.
None of that perimeter touches the sea. Ethiopia lost its Red Sea coast when Eritrea became independent after a referendum in April 1993, and today more than 95 per cent of its trade passes through Djibouti. The standard-gauge Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway, inaugurated on 1 January 2018, is 759 km long, of which 666 km lies inside Ethiopia, a measure in itself of how far the capital is from the nearest port. Our post on Ethiopia’s neighbouring countries looks at each border in turn.
One Time Zone, Two Ways of Telling It
Despite its 15 degrees of longitude, Ethiopia keeps a single time zone, East Africa Time (UTC+03:00), and does not use daylight saving time. Close to the equator, the length of day changes little through the year, so one clock serves the whole country from Gambela to Jijiga.
Most Ethiopians, however, count the hours differently from the official clock. In the traditional 12-hour system the day begins at dawn, so 6:00 a.m. East Africa Time is 12 o’clock and 7:00 a.m. is 1 o’clock; in practice, subtracting six hours from EAT gives Ethiopian time. Visitors crossing the country often find the two systems more confusing than any distance.
Oromia, the Somali Region and Afar: Divisions the Size of Countries
Ethiopia is divided into 12 regions and two chartered cities, Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa, and the largest regions would rank as sizeable countries on their own. Oromia, which surrounds Addis Ababa and reaches south to the Kenyan border, where it shares the border town of Moyale with the Somali Region, covers 353,690 km², almost exactly the size of Germany. The Somali Region covers an estimated 327,068 km², larger than Italy. Afar, home of the Danakil Depression, covers about 96,707 km², and Tigray in the far north about 50,079 km² by a 2006 national statistics report.
Those regions differ as much as the landscapes they hold. Most of Ethiopia’s major cities, and much of its farmland, lie on the plateau in Oromia, the Amhara Region and Tigray, while the hot lowlands of Afar, Gambela and the Somali Region are far more thinly settled. Spread over the whole country, around 138 million people works out at about 125 per km². For where the people are concentrated, see our list of the largest cities in Ethiopia, which begins with Addis Ababa at the centre of the map.