Greece vs South Africa

South Africa is 9.2 times larger than Greece — 1,219,090 against 131,957 km². South Africa is 6.2 times more populous than Greece — 64,747,319 against 10,413,962 people.

Side by side

Population density

Greece is 1.5 times more densely populated than South Africa — 79 against 53 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 — Greece on the right, South Africa on the left.
• Different currencies: the Euro and the South African rand.
• Different continents — Europe and Africa.

Greece

Somewhere between 1,200 and 6,000 islands depending on how you count a rock, of which about 227 are inhabited. Greece has roughly 13,700 km of coastline, the longest in the Mediterranean and eleventh longest in the world. No part of the mainland is more than about 137 km from the sea, and Mount Olympus reaches 2,917 m.

South Africa

One of only a handful of countries with more than one capital, and the only one with three. The Vredefort Dome south-west of Johannesburg is the largest verified impact crater on Earth, about 300 km across and 2 billion years old. The Cape Floral Region packs roughly 9,000 plant species into a small corner of the country, most of them found nowhere else.

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.