Brazil vs Costa Rica

Brazil is 167 times larger than Costa Rica — 8,515,770 against 51,100 km². Brazil is 41 times more populous than Costa Rica — 212,812,405 against 5,152,950 people.

Side by side

Population density

Costa Rica is 4.0 times more densely populated than Brazil — 101 against 25 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

• Different currencies: the Brazilian real and the Costa Rican colón.
• Brazil spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — South America and North America.

Brazil

The fifth-largest country in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It holds about sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest, and the Amazon River discharges roughly a fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world's oceans — more than the next seven rivers combined. Brazil borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.

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.