Mexico vs Peru

Mexico is 1.5 times larger than Peru — 1,964,375 against 1,285,216 km². Mexico is 3.8 times more populous than Peru — 131,946,900 against 34,576,665 people.

Side by side

Population density

Mexico is 2.5 times more densely populated than Peru — 67 against 27 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 Mexican peso and the Peruvian sol.
• Mexico spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — North America and South America.

Mexico

Mexico has the fourth-highest count of vertebrate and plant species of any country, and more reptile species than anywhere else. Chicxulub, under the northern Yucatán, is the roughly 180 km crater left by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The Sistema Sac Actun beneath the same peninsula is the longest known underwater cave system in the world, over 370 km surveyed.

Peru

Peru holds the source of the Amazon and about sixty percent of its territory is Amazon basin, but most people live on the dry Pacific coast. Cotahuasi and Colca are among the deepest canyons in the world, both over 3,000 m. The Nazca lines, drawn on the coastal desert between about 500 BC and AD 500, cover some 450 km² and are only legible from the air or the surrounding hills.

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.