page_title: Central America
section_title: Biodiversity
hierarchical_section_title: Central America / Geography / Biodiversity
caption_attribution_description: The wind this trip was too stiff for diving, but the windsurfers loved it.
context_page_description: Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas and specifically part of the continent known as North America. It goes from Guatemala and Belize in the north-west, to Panama in the south-east. It is the area of land that sits south-east of Mexico and north-west of Colombia. It is between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
  Central America has an area of 524,000 square kilometers. It is almost 0.1% of the Earth's surface. This is a list of the countries in Central America, from the largest to the smallest:
  Nicaragua
  Honduras
  Guatemala
  Panama
  Costa Rica
  Belize
  El Salvador
  While Nicaragua is the largest country in area, of Central America, Guatemala has the largest population by country in Central America, with more than 14 million people and they also have the most populated city in Central America, being Guatemala City.
  Six of the seven countries have Spanish as their official language, with Belize being the non-Spanish speaking country, as their official language is English, although there are now at least 195,597 of people in Belize who speak Spanish.
  Some people also speak indigenous or creole languages like the Maya languages.
context_section_description: Central America is part of the Mesoamerican Biodiversity hotspot, boasting 7% of the world's biodiversity. As a bridge between North and South America, Central America has many species from the Nearctic and the Neotropic ecozones. However the southern countries (Costa Rica and Panama) of the region have more biodiversity than the northern countries (Guatemala and Belize), meanwhile the central countries (Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador) have least biodiversity. The table shows current statistics for the seven countries:
caption: San Pedro Beach in Ambergris Caye, Belize
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