Capitals of Europe

Vatican City covers 0.44 square kilometres and sits inside Rome, so one capital city holds another.

A small continent with many countries

Europe is the second smallest continent, with about 10 million square kilometres, yet it holds more than 40 countries. Its eastern edge is a convention rather than a coastline: by common agreement the line runs along the Ural Mountains and the Ural River, across the Caspian Sea and through the Caucasus. That line cuts through Russia, Kazakhstan and Türkiye, which is why atlases do not always agree on which continent these countries belong to.

Long coastlines and big peninsulas shape the map. Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy and the Balkans each push into the sea, and the Alps run across the middle from France to Austria with Mont Blanc at about 4,800 metres. The Volga, which flows into the Caspian Sea, is the longest river in Europe. Most capitals sit on a river or a harbour: Paris on the Seine, Budapest on both banks of the Danube, Lisbon at the mouth of the Tagus, and Copenhagen and Stockholm on the Baltic.

The largest and the smallest

Russia is the largest country on Earth at about 17.1 million square kilometres. Most of that land is in Asia, but Moscow and most Russians are in Europe. Ukraine, at about 604,000 square kilometres, is the largest country entirely in Europe. The continent also has the world’s smallest states. Vatican City is 0.44 square kilometres, Monaco about 2, San Marino 61, Liechtenstein 160, Malta 316 and Andorra 468. They do not appear on the globe at this scale, so here are their capitals: Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino, Vaduz, Valletta and Andorra la Vella.

Capitals with a twist

Switzerland’s best-known cities are Zurich and Geneva, but the federal government sits in Bern. Swiss law calls Bern the "federal city" rather than the capital, and in practice it does every job a capital does. The Netherlands is the reverse case. Its constitution names Amsterdam as the capital, while the parliament, the government and the king’s working palace are in The Hague.

Germany shows how capitals follow history. After 1949 West Germany governed from the small city of Bonn, and when the country reunited in 1990 Berlin became the capital again. The parliament voted to move there in 1991 and began sitting in Berlin in 1999. Poland’s kings ruled from Kraków for centuries before the royal court moved to Warsaw around 1600. And Ukraine’s capital is now written Kyiv, from the Ukrainian name, in most English-language media instead of the older Kiev.

Easy to mix up

Slovenia and Slovakia are a classic pair. Slovakia borders Austria, and Bratislava sits on the Danube about an hour from Vienna. Slovenia is the small country between Italy and Croatia, and Ljubljana is its capital. The Baltic trio is another set to learn together: Tallinn for Estonia, Riga for Latvia and Vilnius for Lithuania, in order from north to south.

The Balkans need a little extra care because the map changed in living memory. Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s, and its former republics are now separate countries with their own capitals: Ljubljana (Slovenia), Zagreb (Croatia), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Belgrade (Serbia), Podgorica (Montenegro) and Skopje (North Macedonia). Kosovo, with its capital Pristina, declared independence from Serbia in 2008 and is recognised by many but not all countries, so the quiz leaves it out. Montenegro, which separated from Serbia in 2006, is one of the newest countries in Europe. Learning the six capitals as one group, from Ljubljana in the northwest to Skopje in the southeast, is quicker than learning them one at a time.