Landlocked countries have zero coastline. Just above them sit a handful of states with only a token stretch of shore — a few kilometres that can carry the entire seaborne trade of a nation.
The shortest coastlines (excluding landlocked countries)
- Monaco — about 4 km. The principality is essentially a city, and much of its "coast" is now reclaimed land pushed out into the Mediterranean.
- Bosnia and Herzegovina — about 20 km at the town of Neum, splitting Croatia's coast in two. It has no major port of its own and relies on Croatia's Ploče.
- Nauru — about 30 km; the whole country is one small island.
- Democratic Republic of the Congo — about 37 km, a narrow corridor along the Congo River's mouth to the Atlantic, with the port of Banana. This thin strip is why a country of over 100 million people is not landlocked.
- Slovenia — about 47 km of Adriatic coast, with the port of Koper.
- Jordan — about 26 km on the Gulf of Aqaba, its only sea access, with the port of Aqaba.
- Togo — about 56 km on the Gulf of Guinea.
- Iraq — about 58 km on the Persian Gulf, a chronic strategic vulnerability.
Why a short coastline matters
A country with 30–50 km of shore has room for perhaps one deep-water port. That single point of failure carries all its container traffic, fuel imports and grain. If it silts up, is blockaded, or sits behind a difficult land route, the country is effectively cut off. Bolivia lost its coast to Chile in 1879 and has campaigned for sea access ever since; the DR Congo guards its 37 km corridor closely for exactly this reason.
The contrast
Set these against Canada's 202,000 km, Norway's 80,000-plus, or even Greece's 13,700, and the range of "having a coastline" becomes clear. Two countries can both be officially coastal and differ in shore length by a factor of fifty thousand.
The other end of the scale: Canada, Norway and Indonesia, and why coastline length is so hard to measure.
The longest coastlines →