Australia vs Costa Rica

Australia is 151 times larger than Costa Rica — 7,741,220 against 51,100 km². Australia is 5.4 times more populous than Costa Rica — 27,614,411 against 5,152,950 people.

Side by side

Population density

Costa Rica is 28 times more densely populated than Australia — 101 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Costa Rica on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Costa Rican colón.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and North America.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Costa Rica

Costa Rica covers about 0.03 percent of the Earth's surface but holds roughly five percent of its known species. More than a quarter of the country is protected, forest cover has roughly doubled since the 1980s, and it runs on close to 100 percent renewable electricity most years. It has around sixty volcanoes, six of them active.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.