What is the smallest country in the world?

Vatican City is the smallest country in the world by both area and population, and it is not close. It covers about 0.17 square miles (roughly 44 hectares), smaller than many golf courses and city parks, and sits entirely enclosed within the city of Rome, Italy, an independent sovereign state surrounded by another country's capital. Its population is only around 800 people, most of them clergy, officials, and the Swiss Guard, making it tiny by every measure. Vatican City is the governmental and spiritual headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, ruled by the Pope, and it functions as a full country: it issues its own passports and stamps, has its own flag and postal system, and is recognized internationally, despite being something you could walk across in minutes.

After the Vatican, the world's smallest countries are a collection of microstates: Monaco (a wealthy enclave on the French Riviera, and the most densely populated country), Nauru (a tiny Pacific island nation), Tuvalu, San Marino (the world's oldest surviving republic, landlocked inside Italy), and Liechtenstein, among others. Many of the smallest countries are either island nations or European microstates that survived history as independent pockets. These small states often punch above their weight in specific niches, Monaco in wealth and tourism, San Marino in longevity, several as financial or tax havens, but the Vatican's combination of minuscule size, tiny population, immense global religious influence, and unique status as a country inside a city makes it the definitive answer to smallest country, a sovereign nation smaller than many neighborhoods, wielding worldwide spiritual authority from a footprint you could jog around.