Landlocked Countries: The Full List and Why It Matters

Table of Contents

TLDR

There are more than 40 landlocked countries in the world — the exact number shifts between 43 and 45 depending on whether a source counts Kosovo (disputed statehood) and the two landlocked city-states, Vatican City and San Marino. Africa has the most of any continent, with 16. Two countries are “doubly landlocked,” meaning every one of their neighbors is also landlocked: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country by area, Vatican City is the smallest, and Liechtenstein has the highest GDP per capita of the group by a wide margin. Being landlocked isn’t just a geography trivia answer — it typically adds 40-50% to a country’s trade transport costs, which is why so many landlocked nations have spent decades negotiating port access and building rail corridors through their neighbors.

What “Landlocked” Actually Means

A landlocked country has no direct access to an ocean or a sea that connects to the open ocean. That last part trips people up: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan all border the Caspian Sea, and all three are still classified as landlocked, because the Caspian is a closed basin with no natural outlet to the world’s oceans.

Within that category there’s a sharper distinction worth knowing: singly landlocked versus doubly landlocked. A singly landlocked country is surrounded by at least one neighbor that itself has coastline — Austria, for instance, is landlocked, but you can drive from Vienna to a port in a neighboring country without crossing a third border. A doubly landlocked country is surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries, which means reaching the sea means crossing at least two international borders no matter which direction you head.

Only two countries in the world are doubly landlocked: Liechtenstein, wedged between Switzerland and Austria, and Uzbekistan, which is ringed by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan — five neighbors, none of them touching open water either.

From above of sunlit aged paper world map with continents countries and oceans

The Full List of Landlocked Countries

Here’s the complete rundown, organized by continent, with bordering-country count, area, and approximate population. Treat the population figures as recent estimates rather than exact census counts — they shift year to year.

Country Continent Borders Area (km²) Population (approx.)
Botswana Africa 4 581,730 2.5M
Burkina Faso Africa 6 274,200 22M
Burundi Africa 3 27,830 13M
Central African Republic Africa 6 622,984 5.5M
Chad Africa 6 1,284,000 18M
Eswatini Africa 2 17,364 1.2M
Ethiopia Africa 6 1,104,300 126M
Lesotho Africa 1 (enclave in South Africa) 30,355 2.3M
Malawi Africa 3 118,484 20M
Mali Africa 7 1,240,192 23M
Niger Africa 7 1,267,000 27M
Rwanda Africa 4 26,338 14M
South Sudan Africa 6 619,745 11M
Uganda Africa 5 241,038 48M
Zambia Africa 8 752,618 20M
Zimbabwe Africa 4 390,757 16M
Afghanistan Asia 6 652,860 42M
Armenia Asia 4 29,743 3M
Azerbaijan Asia 6 86,600 10M
Bhutan Asia 2 38,394 0.8M
Kazakhstan Asia 5 2,724,900 19M
Kyrgyzstan Asia 4 199,951 7M
Laos Asia 5 236,800 7.5M
Mongolia Asia 2 1,564,110 3.3M
Nepal Asia 2 147,516 30M
Tajikistan Asia 4 143,100 10M
Turkmenistan Asia 4 488,100 6M
Uzbekistan Asia 5 447,400 35M
Andorra Europe 2 468 80K
Austria Europe 8 83,879 9M
Belarus Europe 5 207,600 9.2M
Czech Republic Europe 4 78,867 10.7M
Hungary Europe 7 93,028 9.6M
Kosovo* Europe 4 10,887 1.8M
Liechtenstein Europe 2 160 40K
Luxembourg Europe 3 2,586 660K
Moldova Europe 2 33,846 2.5M
North Macedonia Europe 5 25,713 1.8M
San Marino Europe 1 (enclave in Italy) 61 34K
Serbia Europe 8 88,361 6.6M
Slovakia Europe 5 49,035 5.4M
Switzerland Europe 5 41,285 8.8M
Vatican City Europe 1 (enclave in Italy) 0.44 800
Bolivia South America 5 1,098,581 12M
Paraguay South America 2 406,752 6.9M

*Kosovo’s statehood is not universally recognized, which is the main reason total counts of landlocked countries vary between sources.

Africa Has More Landlocked Countries Than Any Other Continent

Sixteen of Africa’s 54 countries are landlocked — nearly a third of the continent. That’s a direct legacy of the Berlin Conference, where European powers drew borders on a map in 1884 with essentially zero regard for who actually needed coastal access. Landlocked African nations range enormously in size: Chad and Mali both cross the million-square-kilometer mark, while Rwanda and Burundi are small enough that you can cross either one in an afternoon’s drive.

A solitary acacia tree stands tall in the Mara Region's vast savanna under a clear blue sky.

The corridor countries around them matter as much as the landlocked ones themselves. Zambia’s copper exports move through Tanzania’s port at Dar es Salaam via the Tazara railway, a line China built in the 1970s specifically because Zambia needed an export route that didn’t run through apartheid-era South Africa or Rhodesia. Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country, lost its own coastline when Eritrea became independent in 1993, and now routes roughly 95% of its trade through the Ethiopian-built terminal at the Port of Djibouti — a dependency so total that Ethiopia has spent years negotiating for a stake in a second port, in Somaliland, as a hedge.

Asia, Europe, and South America

Asia’s twelve landlocked countries cluster in two groups: the Central Asian “stans” left over from the Soviet Union’s internal republic borders, and the Himalayan and Caucasus states — Nepal, Bhutan, Armenia — hemmed in by mountains rather than politics. Mongolia is the odd one out: sandwiched between Russia and China, it’s the world’s second-largest landlocked country by area and one of the least densely populated countries on Earth.

Europe has the longest list, but a lot of it is small. Fourteen or fifteen landlocked European countries, depending on how you count Kosovo, and roughly half of them are microstates or near-microstates: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, San Marino, Vatican City. These aren’t disadvantaged nations scrambling for port access — Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg are among the wealthiest countries on the planet, landlocked or not, because the EU’s single market and the Rhine’s barge traffic make the coastline largely irrelevant to their economies.

South America has only two: Bolivia and Paraguay. Both lean hard on river access instead — the Paraná-Paraguay Waterway lets Paraguayan soy barges reach the Atlantic via Argentina, and Bolivia has pushed for decades, unsuccessfully, to reclaim a Pacific outlet it lost more than a century ago.

Notable Extremes

Largest by area: Kazakhstan, at roughly 2.72 million km² — bigger than all of Western Europe combined, and the ninth-largest country in the world overall, landlocked or not.

Smallest: Vatican City, at 0.44 km², a walled enclave entirely inside Rome. If you don’t count city-states, Moldova is the smallest landlocked sovereign nation with a conventional territory and population.

Highest GDP per capita: Liechtenstein, where GDP per capita regularly ranks among the top handful of countries worldwide — driven by a banking and manufacturing sector wildly out of proportion to the country’s 160 km² footprint. Luxembourg sits close behind it, propped up by the same financial-services model.

Breathtaking view of the Vorarlberg mountains and alpine village in Austria during summer.

Most populous: Ethiopia, at roughly 126 million people — more than every other landlocked country’s population combined.

How a Country Ends Up Landlocked

Some countries were born landlocked because of where borders happened to fall. Others lost their coastline outright, and the clearest case is Bolivia. Until 1884, Bolivia held around 400 km of Pacific coastline in the Atacama Desert. The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) — fought primarily over nitrate deposits — ended with Chile annexing that territory, and Bolivia has been landlocked ever since. It’s not a settled grudge from a history textbook, either: Bolivia took the dispute to the International Court of Justice as recently as 2018, arguing Chile was obligated to negotiate sovereign coastal access. The court ruled against Bolivia, but the country still marks a national holiday, Día del Mar, mourning the loss every March — a tradition that reflects what makes Bolivia culturally unique.

Ethiopia’s story is more recent. It had Red Sea access through Eritrea until Eritrea’s 1993 independence referendum split the territory in two, leaving Africa’s second-largest population without a port for the first time.

Other countries were simply drawn landlocked from the start — colonial borders in Africa and Central Asia, and mountain geography in the Himalayas and the Alps, meant nations like Nepal, Bhutan, and Switzerland never had coastline to lose.

The Real Cost of No Coastline

Being landlocked isn’t just a geographic footnote — it’s a persistent economic drag. The World Bank and the UN’s Office of the High Representative for LDCs and LLDCs classify 32 countries as landlocked developing countries, and research from those bodies consistently finds landlocked nations pay 40-50% more in transport costs than their coastal counterparts, since every export has to cross at least one additional border, get transshipped at a foreign port, and clear a second country’s customs bureaucracy on top of the destination’s.

That’s driven three broad workarounds:

Transit treaties. Nepal ships virtually all its seaborne trade through Kolkata, India, under a bilateral transit treaty that dates back to 1950 and gets renegotiated periodically. Similar arrangements govern how Zambia uses Tanzanian and South African ports, and how Paraguay uses Argentine river terminals.

Purpose-built corridors. The Northern Corridor connects Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DR Congo to the Kenyan port of Mombasa via road and rail. Ethiopia and Djibouti built a dedicated 750 km electrified railway, completed in 2018, specifically to move Ethiopian containers to the coast faster than trucks could manage the same route.

Regional integration. Europe’s landlocked states largely sidestepped the problem by joining a customs union where goods cross former borders without inspection. A Swiss export bound for Rotterdam clears Dutch customs once, not five separate times — a level of frictionless access that landlocked countries outside the EU can only negotiate for piecemeal, treaty by treaty.

FAQ

How many landlocked countries are there? Most current counts land between 43 and 45, depending on whether the source recognizes Kosovo as a sovereign state and whether it counts Vatican City and San Marino separately as landlocked microstates rather than special cases.

Which continent has the most landlocked countries? Africa, with 16 — nearly a third of its 54 nations.

What’s the difference between landlocked and doubly landlocked? A landlocked country has no coastline. A doubly landlocked country has no coastline and is also surrounded exclusively by other landlocked countries, meaning reaching the sea requires crossing at least two borders. Only Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan meet that bar.

Can a landlocked country have a navy? Yes — several do, operating on rivers and lakes rather than open ocean. Bolivia maintains a navy on Lake Titicaca and the Paraguay River, partly as a practical patrol force and partly to keep alive its claim to a future Pacific coastline.

Does being landlocked always mean a country is poor? No. It correlates with lower GDP across landlocked developing countries broadly, but Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein are proof that strong regional trade integration and a well-developed transport corridor can neutralize the disadvantage almost entirely.