The capitals of the world: every trap in the quiz

A capital is a political choice, not a demographic fact. It is the city where the institutions sit — sometimes to balance regions against one another, sometimes to keep power away from an over-mighty metropolis, sometimes to create a national symbol where there was nothing. Hence the surprises.

When the capital is not the largest city

This is trap number one, and it affects a good twenty countries. The logic is almost always the same: settle a rivalry between two cities by choosing neither, or deliberately decentre power.

Canberra is the clearest example: Sydney and Melbourne were fighting over the title when the Australian federation formed in 1901. The solution was to build a new city halfway between them, on farmland. Washington follows the same logic — a federal district created between North and South, belonging to no state.

The countries with several capitals

Nothing obliges a country to concentrate its institutions in one place. A dozen states spread them out, and that is the second most common source of error.

• South Africa: three capitals. Pretoria for the executive, Cape Town for Parliament, Bloemfontein for the Supreme Court of Appeal. It is the founding compromise of the 1910 Union of South Africa.
• Bolivia: Sucre is the constitutional capital and seat of the judiciary; La Paz hosts the government and Parliament.
• The Netherlands: Amsterdam is the capital named in the constitution, but government, Parliament and the royal residence are all in The Hague.
• Chile: Santiago is the capital; the National Congress sits in Valparaíso.
• Benin: Porto-Novo is official, Cotonou holds the actual power.
• Côte d'Ivoire: Yamoussoukro has been the capital since 1983; Abidjan remains the de facto political and economic centre.
• Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur is the capital, but the administration moved to Putrajaya.
• Sri Lanka: Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte is the administrative capital, in the suburbs of Colombo.
• Eswatini: Mbabane is the administrative capital, Lobamba the royal and legislative one.

The capitals built from scratch

Several countries created their capital from nothing, generally to rebalance a territory whose economic life was concentrated on the coast.

• Brasília, inaugurated in 1960 on an empty plateau in the centre of the country, designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The goal: turn Brazil away from its Atlantic façade.
• Abuja, capital of Nigeria since 1991, chosen at the geographic centre of the country, at a distance from the main regional balances.
• Astana, capital of Kazakhstan since 1997, set down in the northern steppe, 1,200 km from Almaty. The city changed name twice in a few years: Nur-Sultan in 2019, then Astana again in 2022.
• Naypyidaw, inaugurated in 2005 by the Burmese junta, famous for its near-empty twenty-lane avenues.
• Nusantara, under construction on Borneo, intended to replace Jakarta — a megacity that is literally sinking several centimetres a year.

The records you would not guess

• Highest: La Paz, seat of the Bolivian government, around 3,600 metres. If you restrict yourself to constitutional capitals, Quito wins at 2,850 metres, ahead of Sucre and Bogotá.
• Northernmost: Reykjavík, a hair below the Arctic Circle.
• Southernmost: Wellington.
• Closest pair: Kinshasa and Brazzaville face each other across the Congo River, a few kilometres apart. No other pair of capitals of different countries is that close — Rome and the Vatican aside, since one is enclosed inside the other.
• Most populous: Tokyo, whose urban area exceeds anything else on Earth.

The free answers: capitals named after their country

One family of answers comes for free: countries whose capital carries, more or less, the name of the country. Mexico City in Mexico, Panama City in Panama, Guatemala City in Guatemala, Djibouti in Djibouti, Kuwait City in Kuwait, Tunis in Tunisia, Algiers in Algeria, San Marino in San Marino, Luxembourg in Luxembourg, Monaco in Monaco, Singapore in Singapore.

The same goes for small island states, where the capital is simply the only town: Malé in the Maldives, Nassau in the Bahamas, Victoria in the Seychelles.

The cities people think are capitals

Let us finish with the reverse list — the metropolises everyone names by reflex, wrongly: Istanbul, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Toronto, Auckland, Casablanca, Lagos, Karachi, Almaty, Geneva, Zurich, Dar es Salaam, Milan, Barcelona, Mumbai. All better known than their country's capital, and none of them its institutional seat.

Geneva deserves a special mention: the city hosts the UN, the WHO, the WTO and the Red Cross — and Switzerland does not even use the word capital, preferring to call Bern its “federal city”, a cautious formulation that avoids the term altogether.

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