List of Countries and Capitals

I have previously shared some frustrations with aggregating a good list of countries and capitals. The problem is that the word country is a bit arbitrary and used to represent everything from sovereign states, various dependencies, special sovereign lands, uninhabited islands, and other entities. Adding to this, we have self-declared sovereign states like Somaliland that are unrecognized by most organizations so it’s hard to tell how you want to define that and which capital city to use. Moreover, there are countries that claim the same capital city (Jerusalem), islands with rotating capitals (Tokelau), and large geographical areas with no capital (Antarctica). So, here is my take on aggregating a complete list of countries and capitals of the world.

My definition of a country is any piece of land on this earth. To give context, I have provided the continent in which the country exists. Where applicable, I am also providing the ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 country code but the International Organization for Standardization does not recognize Somaliland and Northern Cyprus. Finally, unlike most lists out there, I am also providing the geographical coordinates for each capital and below the table you can find links to CSV and JSON representations of this country and capital list.

All Countries and Capitals with Latitude and Longitude Data

countries and capitals in JSON
countries and capitals in CSV

External:

Comparison of IOC, FIFA, and ISO 3166 country codes