Terragotcha

Learn world geography on an interactive 3D globe

Terragotcha is an interactive globe with every country rendered as real geometry rather than a flat image, so borders stay sharp however far you zoom in. Spin it, search for a country, or take a quiz: name the flag, find the country against the clock, or work through the daily challenge.

Below are some of the countries worth finding first — the largest, the smallest and the most remote — followed by the written country guides. Every one of them is on the globe.

Notable countries

Superlatives measured against the same geometry the globe is built from. Areas are land area in square kilometres; the north–south figures are the latitude of each country's geographic centre.

  • Largest country

    Russia

    17,098,242 km²

    Russia stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific and spans eleven time zones. Its land area is more than a ninth of the world's total, though most of that ground is Siberian forest and tundra where very few people live.

  • Second largest

    Canada

    9,984,670 km²

    Canada is second only to Russia in area, yet almost the entire population lives within a few hundred kilometres of the United States border. Nearly everything north of that ribbon is lake, boreal forest and Arctic archipelago.

  • Third largest

    China

    9,706,961 km²

    China's territory runs from the Himalaya to the Pacific coast, taking in the Gobi Desert, the Tibetan Plateau and the Yangtze basin. It shares land borders with fourteen countries.

  • Fourth largest

    USA

    9,372,610 km²

    The United States covers everything from Alaskan tundra to Florida wetland, with the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi basin in between. Alaska on its own is larger than any country in Europe apart from Russia.

  • Fifth largest

    Brazil

    8,515,767 km²

    Brazil covers close to half of South America and holds the greater part of the Amazon basin. It borders every country on the continent except Chile and Ecuador.

  • Sixth largest

    Australia

    7,692,024 km²

    Australia is the only country that is also a continent, and the driest one that is inhabited. The interior is largely desert; the cities cluster on the southeastern and southwestern coasts.

  • Smallest country

    Vatican City

    0.44 km²

    The Vatican is a walled enclave inside Rome, small enough to fit into a large city park. It has been a sovereign state in its present form since the Lateran Treaty of 1929, and it is the one country on the globe you have to zoom all the way in to see.

  • Second smallest

    Monaco

    2.02 km²

    Monaco occupies a stretch of Mediterranean coast smaller than many airports, wedged between the sea and the French Alpes-Maritimes. It has repeatedly extended itself seawards by reclaiming land from the harbour.

  • Sixth smallest

    Nauru

    21 km²

    Nauru is a single raised coral island in the central Pacific, so small that a coastal road loops the entire country in under half an hour. Decades of phosphate mining stripped most of the interior.

  • Furthest north

    Greenland

    74.7° N

    No other large territory has its geographic centre this far north. An ice sheet covers roughly four-fifths of Greenland, and the settlements are strung along the ice-free fringe of the coast.

  • Furthest south

    Chile

    37.2° S

    Chile runs more than 4,000 kilometres down the Pacific edge of South America, from the Atacama Desert — the driest non-polar place on Earth — to the fjords and glaciers of Patagonia. Nowhere is it much more than 350 kilometres wide.

Country guides

Longer written guides, each with the country framed on the globe alongside it.

  • France

    France stretches from the chalk cliffs of the Channel to the Mediterranean, a country whose geography has shaped a literature preoccupied with the pull between province and capital.

  • Germany

    Germany sits at the crossing point of Europe, bordering nine countries — more than any other state on the continent — and its literature has circled that condition of being always in the middle of things.

  • Italy

    Italy runs 1,200 kilometres into the Mediterranean, a peninsula whose fragmented geography kept it politically divided until 1861 — and whose city-states, competing rather than combining, produced the Renaissance.

  • Spain

    Spain occupies most of the Iberian Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees and turned for centuries toward Africa and the Atlantic — a position that gave it both an empire and the first modern novel.