
Area: 45 226 km²
Total length of national border: 1,450.2 km
Length of the Estonian Baltic Sea coast: 768.6 km
Population: 1,364 million (Source: Population Register in 2000)
Borders: Latvia, Russia.
Languages of Estonia
Official language: Estonian.
Estonian is spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and thousands in various expatriate communities. Estonian is a Uralic language closely related to Finnish.
Geography of Estonia
Estonia is a flat country with an area of 45,226 square kilometers. Estonia has many islands – the largest are Saaremaa (literally island country) and Hiiumaa. The two islands are popular Estonian vacation spots. The country's highest point, Suur Munamägi (Egg Mountain), lies in the hilly south-east and reaches 318 meters above sea level. The country has over 1,400 natural and artificial lakes.
Nature
Almost half of Estonia's territory (47.6 percent) is covered by forests and forests; the forest area has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Estonia lies in a border area where the European-Siberian coniferous taiga opens into a European deciduous forest zone. There are 87 native and more than 500 introduced tree and shrub species listed. Scots pine is the most common tree in Estonian forests - it dominates in 41 percent of forests, followed by birch (silver and downy birch) - 28 percent, Norway spruce - 23 percent, alder (grey and red alder) and aspen.
Estonia is rich in wetlands. There are about 165 000 swamps larger than one hectare, of which 132 bogs are larger than 1000 hectares. The total area of swamps and swamp forests is 1,009,101 ha, which is over a fifth (22.3 percent) of the country.