Eastern Africa
Flag of Madagascar
An island that evolved entirely on its own.
Colours, by share of the flag
- #f0f0f0 33%
- #f03030 33%
- #007830 33%
Measured from the flag artwork itself, so shares are approximate and emblems get folded into the nearest tone.
Madagascar in numbers
| Official name | Republic of Madagascar |
|---|---|
| Capital | Antananarivo |
| Region | Eastern Africa, Africa |
| Population | 27,691,019 |
| Area | 587,041 km² · 47 people per km² |
| Currency | Malagasy ariary (MGA) |
| Languages | French, Malagasy |
| Country codes | MG · MDG · .mg |
| Coastline | Has a coast |
Things worth knowing
- Madagascar broke away from the African mainland tens of millions of years ago, and its long isolation let life evolve so distinctly that the vast majority of its mammals, reptiles, and amphibians exist nowhere else on Earth.
- It is the only place lemurs live in the wild, having arrived as ancestral primates and diversified into roughly a hundred species, from the mouse-sized mouse lemur to the indri, the largest of them all, whose haunting song carries through the forest like a whale's.
- The Malagasy people trace much of their ancestry and language to seafarers from distant Borneo, making their tongue a relative of Indonesian languages despite Madagascar sitting off the coast of Africa.
Did you know
The island's baobab trees, with their swollen trunks and stubby crowns, look so upside-down that local legend says the gods planted them roots-up in a fit of pique.
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Country data from the mledoze/countries dataset under ODbL 1.0. Flag artwork from the same dataset. All 196 flags.