The Vatican is the world’s smallest country. Walk from one end to the other, and you’ll cover just 0.44 square kilometers (0.17 square miles) in about ten minutes. Yet this tiny state serves as the spiritual headquarters for 1.4 billion Catholics around the globe.
The pope runs this theocratic nation – he’s both the Bishop of Rome and the leader of the Catholic Church. It’s hard to find another country with so little land but so much global reach.
@Goran tek-en
Interestingly, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building on Earth, is longer than the Vatican is wide.
The Burj Khalifa stands 829.8 m (2,722 feet), tall. Vatican City measures 1,050 meters (3,445 feet) long and 850 meters (2,789 feet) wide. The building’s height is comparable to the width of the entire country.
The floor space comparison is even more surprising. The Burj Khalifa has 309,473 square meters (3,331,100 square feet) spread across 163 floors. The Vatican’s total land area—St. Peter’s Basilica, the museums, the gardens, every building and courtyard—comes to 440,298 square meters (4,739,328 square feet).
Do the math and you could squeeze the entire Vatican into about 1.4 Burj Khalifas. An independent nation with embassies, a postal service, and its own radio station fits into roughly one skyscraper plus change.
