The most geocaching-crazy countries in Europe
I wanted to check, which countries have the highest number of geocaches (thereotically one could use such information in order to choose the best vacation country - although such an approach would be crazy without a doubt). I simply searched the total number of caches in a country, without taking into account that some of the caches are disabled now.
So here`s the table:
As you can see, no one is quite as geocaching obsessed as the Germans - with a stunning total of 75191 geocaches. There`s no competition for the first place, as the second positioned UK has "only" 35310 caches. The swedes are third, Czech Republic fourth, followed by Denmark and France. Out of Baltic countries Estonia has the highest caches tally - 772, against 449 in Latvia and 435 in Lithuania. It can be clearly seen that geocaching isn`t too popular in the Balkan region and in other post-soviet countries, apart from the Baltic block. The gigantic Russia has only 62 caches, while Belarus has just one measly cache.
However I also wanted to check it from another aspect - the average number of geocaches in a country on 1000 km2. That is - cache density. It is no wonder that countries like Germany and the UK have tons of caches - they are huge themselves. So here`s the second table:
This time I had to remove "dwarf" countries from the list, as Vatican with a total of 2 caches would in that case have the world record in geocache density (its total area is less than 1 km2).
Once again Germany tops the charts, however the margin isn`t that big this time, with Denmark coming in close second. Luxembourg (which I don`t consider a dwarf country) is third, followed by the Dutch and the Swiss. The biggest gap is between Belgium and Austria, and between Austria and Portugal - that is Austria is the "split" country between those that are geocaching obsessed and those that are not. Strange as it may seem Latvia is here approximately in the same position as in the first chart, next to Spain and Italy, both of which have vast numbers of caches - but also lots of land.