Continents
The continents of the world
Six continents, and one of them has no countries on it at all. Each page shows how many countries there are, which is biggest, and the mountains, rivers and wonders you find there.
- Europe 45 countries About 744.8 million people live here.
- Asia 46 countries About 4.5 billion people live here.
- Africa 54 countries About 1.3 billion people live here.
- The Americas 35 countries About 1 billion people live here.
- Oceania 14 countries About 40.9 million people live here.
- Antarctica 0 countries Nobody lives here permanently.
What a continent actually is
A continent is one of the very large pieces of land the world is divided into. That sounds precise until you look closely: nobody agrees how many there are. Seven is taught in Britain, Australia and much of Asia; six in France, Italy, Spain and most of Latin America; five if you count only the ones people live on. The land is the same in every version — the grouping is a human habit, not a measurement.
This site uses six and keeps North and South America together, because that is how the dataset behind every country page groups things. Keeping one convention throughout means the numbers on these pages can be added up and compared without quietly counting a country twice.
The continents were once one
Look at the eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa and they fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw. They did. The continents sit on slabs of rock that drift a few centimetres a year — about the speed a fingernail grows — and roughly two hundred million years ago they were joined in a single mass. They are still moving, which is why the Atlantic is a little wider now than when you were born, and why earthquakes and volcanoes cluster along the lines where the slabs meet.
Where the borders are arguments
Europe and Asia sit on one unbroken piece of land, and the line between them runs along the Ural mountains because people drew it there, not because there is a sea in the way. Russia and Turkey lie on both sides of it. Egypt sits in Africa and Asia at once, with the Suez Canal cut through the join. Every continent page here says which countries it counts, so you can always see the choice being made rather than having to guess it.