There are 44 landlocked countries in the world — nations entirely enclosed by land with no coastline. The largest is Kazakhstan (2.72 million km²) and two countries — Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein — are doubly landlocked (surrounded only by other landlocked countries).
What Having No Coast Actually Costs
A landlocked country must move every seaborne import and export across at least one foreign border, which means paying for another country's roads, railways and port handling, and accepting its customs rules, its labour disputes and its politics. Freight costs run substantially higher than for coastal neighbours at comparable distances, and the delays are as damaging as the price.
The less obvious loss is maritime. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea a coastal state claims a territorial sea and an exclusive economic zone extending 200 nautical miles, with rights to the fish, the seabed and anything beneath it. A landlocked state claims none of that. Mongolia is larger than Alaska and has no fishing rights, no offshore oil and no seabed minerals at all.
International law does offer a partial remedy. Part X of UNCLOS grants landlocked states a right of access to and from the sea and freedom of transit through neighbouring territory, and the 1965 New York Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States sets out the terms. Both depend on the transit country's cooperation, which is exactly what fails when relations sour.
All 44 Landlocked Countries by Region
- Africa (16): Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe
- Europe (14): Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Moldova, North Macedonia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland
- Asia (12): Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
- South America (2): Bolivia, Paraguay
Africa has the most landlocked countries (16), reflecting the arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which divided the continent with little regard for geographic access to the sea. Many of these countries — Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic — are among the poorest in the world.
Europe's 14 landlocked countries include some of the world's wealthiest nations (Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria, Liechtenstein), demonstrating that landlocked status is not an automatic sentence to poverty. These countries benefit from excellent infrastructure, political stability, and location at the heart of the world's largest trading bloc (the EU).
Largest and Smallest Landlocked Countries
- Largest: Kazakhstan: 2.72 million km² — world's 9th largest country overall
- 2nd Largest: Mongolia: 1.56 million km² — vast Central Asian steppe
- 3rd Largest: Chad: 1.28 million km² — Saharan/Sahelian Africa
- Smallest: Vatican City: 0.44 km² — smallest sovereign state in the world
- 2nd Smallest: San Marino: 61 km² — entirely surrounded by Italy
- 3rd Smallest: Liechtenstein: 160 km² — between Switzerland and Austria
Kazakhstan is so large that it could fit France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Japan combined within its borders — yet it has no access to the open ocean. The Caspian Sea, its western border, is technically the world's largest lake (despite being called a "sea"), offering no connection to the world's oceans.
Lesotho is unique — it's the only country in the world entirely surrounded by a single other country (South Africa). This makes it completely dependent on South Africa for all trade access, energy supplies, and transportation links. Vatican City and San Marino share a similar situation, both entirely enclosed by Italy.
Doubly Landlocked Countries
- Liechtenstein: Surrounded by Switzerland and Austria — both landlocked
- Uzbekistan: Surrounded by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan — all landlocked
A doubly landlocked country must cross at least two borders to reach the nearest coastline. There are only two such countries in the world: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. Liechtenstein's situation is mitigated by its location in wealthy, well-connected Europe. Uzbekistan's situation is far more challenging — it is surrounded by five landlocked nations in Central Asia, and reaching the nearest seaport requires crossing multiple countries with varying infrastructure quality.
Uzbekistan is the only doubly landlocked country with a large population (approximately 36 million people). Its main trade routes run through Kazakhstan to Russia's ports, or through Turkmenistan and Iran to the Persian Gulf — all long, expensive, and dependent on political relationships with transit countries.
Economic Impact of Being Landlocked
- Trade Costs: Landlocked developing countries face trade costs 50–60% higher than coastal neighbors
- GDP Impact: Landlocked developing countries have average GDP 20% lower than coastal equivalents
- Transit Dependence: Must negotiate access rights and maintain relations with transit countries
- Infrastructure: Dependent on neighbors' roads, rails, and ports for international trade
- Exceptions: Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria prove landlocked can mean wealthy — with the right conditions
The United Nations recognizes 32 Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) as a distinct group facing unique challenges. These countries trade less, grow more slowly, and attract less foreign investment than comparable coastal nations. The extra transportation costs of reaching seaports — estimated at 50–60% higher — make their exports less competitive in global markets.
Switzerland is the most dramatic exception to the landlocked disadvantage. With GDP per capita exceeding $87,000, it's one of the richest countries on Earth. Its success comes from highly specialized, high-value industries (banking, pharmaceuticals, precision manufacturing), excellent infrastructure, political stability, and its central European location. Essentially, Switzerland exports products so valuable per kilogram that high transport costs are irrelevant.
Strategic Challenges and Adaptations
- Bolivia: Lost its coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–1884); still claims access
- Ethiopia: Lost its coastline when Eritrea became independent in 1993; uses Djibouti's port
- Nepal: Depends on India for trade; India has imposed economic blockades as leverage
- Mongolia: Squeezed between Russia and China; uses Chinese ports for most trade
- Paraguay: Uses the Paraguay and Paraná rivers as trade arteries to the Atlantic
Bolivia maintains a "Day of the Sea" holiday and a small navy on Lake Titicaca to symbolize its claim to the Pacific coast lost to Chile in 1884. Bolivia has taken Chile to the International Court of Justice over the dispute, but the court ruled in 2018 that Chile was not obligated to negotiate sea access.
Several landlocked countries use rivers as alternatives to ocean access. Paraguay's river system connects it to the Atlantic via Argentina. Laos uses the Mekong River for regional trade. The Rhine-Main-Danube canal system connects landlocked European countries to both the North Sea and the Black Sea — an infrastructure triumph that took centuries to complete.
Three Countries Surrounded by Exactly One Other
A country enclosed entirely within a single neighbour is a rarer case than being landlocked, and there are three of them.
Lesotho is ringed on all sides by South Africa, a mountainous kingdom of roughly 30,000 km2 sitting above the Drakensberg escarpment. It is the only one of the three that is a large country by any normal measure, and the only one outside Europe.
San Marino and Vatican City are both enclaved within Italy. San Marino claims to be the oldest surviving republic, founded by tradition in 301 AD, and covers 61 km2 around Monte Titano. Vatican City, at 0.49 km2, is both the smallest country in the world and the smallest landlocked one.
Lesotho is frequently described as the only such country, which is incorrect — the claim usually comes from lists that quietly exclude microstates.
Bolivia Lost Its Coast and Never Accepted It
Bolivia is the clearest case of a country that became landlocked and has spent 140 years contesting it.
Until the War of the Pacific, fought from 1879 to 1884, Bolivia held the Litoral province with about 400 km of Pacific coast including the port of Antofagasta. Chile took it, and the 1904 treaty confirmed the loss in exchange for a railway and guaranteed transit rights. Bolivia has never treated the matter as settled: it marks the Day of the Sea every 23 March, and it maintains a navy of several thousand personnel that patrols Lake Titicaca and the river systems, waiting on a coastline that has not existed since the nineteenth century. Bolivia took the dispute to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in 2018 that Chile is under no legal obligation to negotiate sovereign access.
Two countries joined the list much more recently and much more quietly. Ethiopia became the most populous landlocked country in the world in 1993, when Eritrea's independence took the entire Red Sea coast with it; it now routes something like 90 per cent of its trade through Djibouti. Serbia became landlocked in 2006 when Montenegro voted to leave their union, taking the Adriatic coast.
Why Some Landlocked Countries Are Rich Anyway
The correlation between landlocked status and low income is real but not universal, and the exceptions cluster in Europe for identifiable reasons.
Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein are all landlocked and all wealthy. Each sits inside a dense, stable, high-income customs area where crossing a border costs almost nothing; each has navigable river access to the sea, with Basel functioning as Switzerland's ocean port via the Rhine to Rotterdam and Austria connected to the Black Sea by the Danube; and each specialises in goods and services where transport cost is a negligible share of value — pharmaceuticals, precision instruments, banking, software.
The UN recognises a separate category for the countries where the disadvantage does bite: 32 Landlocked Developing Countries, mostly in Africa and Central Asia, addressed by the Vienna Programme of Action. What separates them from the European group is less the absence of a coast than the quality of what lies between them and one. Nepal's 2015 blockade at the Indian border, which produced months of fuel and medicine shortages, showed how quickly transit dependence becomes leverage.
The workarounds are largely institutional: corridor agreements that fix transit terms in advance, inland dry ports where customs clearance happens at origin rather than at the border, and dedicated rail links such as the Addis Ababa-Djibouti line opened in 2018. Where those exist, the penalty shrinks; where they do not, it compounds.
The Caspian Question
One case complicates the count. Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan all sit on or near the Caspian Sea, which is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth and has no natural connection to any ocean.
Whether it is a sea or a lake mattered enormously, because a sea would be divided under maritime law with EEZs and seabed rights, while a lake would be divided by agreement among the five littoral states. The dispute ran for more than two decades after the Soviet collapse and was settled by the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, which gave it a bespoke status that is neither. Either way, the countries on it remain landlocked in the sense that matters for trade: nothing floats out of the Caspian to a world port except via the Volga-Don canal system through Russia.