How big is Andorra?

Andorra’s area fits in a single line, 468 km², or roughly 181 square miles. What that number doesn’t tell you is more interesting. This is a vertical country, with its towns packed into a handful of valleys and the rest given over to mountain, forest and lake. Here’s the official figure, how to picture it, and why in practice the place feels bigger than the map suggests.

468 km², officially

The Spanish foreign ministry’s September 2026 profile gives 468 km², the same figure the Andorran tourist board uses. In square miles that’s about 181, by my conversion. In this guide, which works across Europe from smallest to largest, Andorra is country 6 of 47, after the Vatican, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein and Malta, and it’s the biggest of that group of six.

For a British reader, the most useful yardstick is probably Malta, another favourite of British holidaymakers. Andorra is about one and a half times its size. It’s almost three times Liechtenstein, nearly eight times San Marino, and you could fit more than two hundred Monacos inside it. The big difference is that Andorra’s area is almost all slope.

A country measured in height

What really defines Andorra is altitude. The Spanish foreign ministry gives an average of 1,996 m, which is extraordinary for a whole country. Even its lowest point, where the Runer flows into the Valira by the southern border, sits at 840 m, and at the top stands Comapedrosa, 2,942 m. That’s a climb of more than 2,100 m from bottom to top. The peaks close to that height are in the mountains of Andorra.

That height turns short hops into long drives. Between the town of Encamp and Pas de la Casa, both in the same parish, there are 25 km of mountain road, and through the cold months, until mid-May, the car has to carry snow chains or run on winter tyres. That’s why I measure Andorra in time rather than square kilometres.

How big is each parish?

Here the official sources thin out. The tourist board gives Canillo at 120.86 km², the largest parish, accounting for one square kilometre in every four. Encamp’s comú mentions an area of about 82 km², nearly 18% of the country, on a page I could only read through its archive.org copy. Andorra la Vella is described only as the smallest, with no figure. For the rest I haven’t found an official number, so I won’t make one up. What each parish is like is in the parishes of Andorra.

How much of it is built on?

Less than it looks from the main road. The tourist board gives two different percentages on two different pages, 8% urbanised on one and around 4% built on the other, so I won’t treat either as fact. What both agree on is that natural land covers more than nine hectares in every ten.

The Madriu valley alone, at 4,247 hectares, takes up almost a tenth of Andorra, and there isn’t a single road in it. More in the Madriu valley.

What it means for your trip

You don’t need long to see the whole country, but you do need to plan. I’d group days by valley, one for Ordino and La Massana, one for Canillo and Encamp, and one for the capital and the Madriu. With that split, three or four days cover the essentials without half of each day spent behind the wheel.

The size also shapes where you land. There’s no airport inside the country, and the nearest, Andorra-La Seu, is in Spain with no confirmed 2026-27 routes, so British visitors normally fly to Toulouse or Barcelona and cover the last stretch by coach or hire car. The Foreign Office reminds drivers that a UK photocard licence is valid, and, as mentioned above, the winter-kit rule runs well into spring. Build that drive into your first and last days rather than squeezing it in.

National buses cover the whole country, but they run every 20 minutes on the shorter lines and hourly on the longer ones. How to get around without losing your morning is in getting around Andorra, and where everything sits is in the map of Andorra. The lesson I’d take away is simple, in Andorra the mountains set the distances, not the map. Exactly where it sits, between France and Spain and how far from the big cities, is in where Andorra is.