A country’s capital is the city that houses its seat of government. This lookup lets you search the capital of countries worldwide, along with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, the continent, and approximate coordinates for mapping.
How it works
The tool stores each country with its primary capital city, ISO code, continent, and the latitude/longitude of the capital’s approximate centre. Searching matches both the country name and the capital name, so typing “Tokyo” finds Japan and typing “Japan” finds Tokyo. The continent filter narrows the list to a single region.
Some countries have more than one capital with separate governmental functions (South Africa is the classic example), and many capitals are not the largest city in their country. The data reflects the constitutionally primary or most commonly cited capital.
Capital ≠ largest city — notable examples
This is one of the most commonly tested geography facts, and the list is longer than most people expect:
| Country | Capital | Largest city |
|---|---|---|
| United States | Washington D.C. | New York City |
| Australia | Canberra | Sydney |
| Brazil | Brasília | São Paulo |
| Turkey | Ankara | Istanbul |
| Canada | Ottawa | Toronto |
| South Africa | Pretoria (exec.) | Johannesburg |
| Nigeria | Abuja | Lagos |
| Pakistan | Islamabad | Karachi |
| India | New Delhi | Mumbai |
| Myanmar | Naypyidaw | Yangon |
Many of these purpose-built or relocated capitals were chosen specifically because they were not the largest city — to reduce the political and economic dominance of one metropolis over the rest of the country.
Countries with multiple capitals
| Country | Capitals and roles |
|---|---|
| South Africa | Pretoria (executive) · Cape Town (legislative) · Bloemfontein (judicial) |
| Bolivia | Sucre (constitutional/judicial) · La Paz (seat of government/executive) |
| Malaysia | Kuala Lumpur (legislative/royal) · Putrajaya (administrative) |
| Netherlands | Amsterdam (constitutional) · The Hague (government/parliament) |
When a dataset lists only one capital per country, these are usually recorded by the primary administrative seat.
Why the coordinates matter
The latitude and longitude included for each capital are useful for:
- Calculating distance between capitals (great-circle distance)
- Placing capitals on a map for visualisation
- Cross-referencing against time-zone datasets (most capitals sit in the country’s primary time zone)
- Estimating time differences between world cities
Coordinates are approximate city-centre points rounded to a few decimal places — not the exact location of any government building.
Cross-referencing with ISO codes
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code (US, GB, DE, JP, etc.) is the universal identifier used by:
- Currency datasets (ISO 4217)
- Telephone dialing codes (ITU-T E.164)
- Country-code top-level domains (.us, .gb, .de, .jp)
- Language tags (BCP 47 region subtags)
- Time-zone databases (IANA tz database country codes)
Using the ISO code from this lookup, you can join the capital data with any of these datasets without ambiguity.