Landlocked countries: 44 places with no ocean coast, and what that actually means

A short visual guide to the 44 countries with no sea coast.

November 13, 2026

The short answer

44 countries have no coastline on the open ocean. That count covers the 195 widely recognised states plus Vatican City. Two of them, Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan, are doubly landlocked: every country they border is landlocked too.

The number changes with the convention you use. Lists that count Kosovo as a separate country reach 45. Lists that count only the UN's development group of landlocked developing countries stop at 32. When two sources "disagree" about how many landlocked countries there are, they are almost always counting different sets of places.

Where they are

By continent, the 44 break down as follows:

Africa: 16. These include Ethiopia, Uganda, Niger, Mali, Chad, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.
Europe: 16. These are Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Belarus, Moldova, North Macedonia, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino and Vatican City. Armenia and Azerbaijan are also counted here, although some lists place them in Asia.
Asia: 10. These are Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan and Laos.
South America: 2. These are Bolivia and Paraguay.
Oceania and North America: 0.

Lesotho, San Marino and Vatican City are a special case. Each is entirely surrounded by a single country: South Africa for Lesotho, and Italy for the other two.

Big and small, crowded and empty

Being landlocked says nothing about size.

Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country by land area, and the ninth largest country overall.
Ethiopia is the most populous. The UN's World Population Prospects 2024 projects about 139 million people for July 2026. Uganda follows with roughly 53 million, then Afghanistan with about 45 million.
At the other end, Vatican City has a few hundred residents, and San Marino and Liechtenstein each have under 45,000.

Area and population measure different things. One tells you how much territory lacks a coast. The other tells you how many people live with that geography every day.

"But it touches water"

Three landlocked countries, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, border the Caspian Sea. The Caspian is the world's largest inland body of water, but it has no natural connection to the ocean, so these countries are still classed as landlocked. The same applies to countries with large lakes, such as Malawi, Uganda and Rwanda, or with navigable rivers, such as Paraguay and Switzerland. A shoreline is not the same thing as an ocean coastline.

This is also why Uzbekistan counts as doubly landlocked. All five of its neighbours lack an ocean coast: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Treating the Caspian as an ocean would wrongly make Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan coastal.

Countries that became landlocked

Some countries were not always landlocked.

Bolivia lost its Pacific coast to Chile after the War of the Pacific (1879–1884). In 2013 it took Chile to the International Court of Justice, arguing that Chile was obliged to negotiate sovereign sea access. In 2018 the Court ruled that Chile had no such legal obligation.
Ethiopia became landlocked when Eritrea became independent in 1993. Today most of Ethiopia's foreign trade moves through the port of Djibouti.
Serbia became landlocked in 2006, when Montenegro, its partner in the former state union, voted for independence.

Why the UN tracks a smaller group of 32

The UN's landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) are a policy group, not a geography list. It leaves out high-income landlocked states such as Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg, which shows that having no coast is not a measure of prosperity. Transit costs, border delays and the quality of a neighbour's roads, railways and ports shape the outcome as much as the map does.

The current framework is the Awaza Programme of Action for 2024–2034. The UN General Assembly adopted it on 24 December 2024 (resolution A/RES/79/233), and it was endorsed at the Third UN Conference on LLDCs in Awaza, Turkmenistan, in August 2025.

A right of passage

International law gives landlocked states a guaranteed route to the sea. Part X of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Articles 124–132) grants them "the right of access to and from the sea" and "freedom of transit through the territory of transit States by all means of transport". The terms, such as which ports, which corridors and what fees, are agreed bilaterally with neighbours. That is why transit agreements matter so much to countries such as Nepal, Paraguay and Ethiopia.

Quick quiz

1.
Which two countries are doubly landlocked? (Liechtenstein, Uzbekistan)
2.
Which are the only landlocked countries in the Americas? (Bolivia, Paraguay)
3.
Does a Caspian Sea coast make a country coastal? (No)
4.
How many countries are in the UN's LLDC group? (32)