How big is British Columbia?

It’s big.

Vast.

Bigger than most US states, bigger than most countries.

This Canadian province is so huge that most people who live there rarely see it all. It’s so vast that you’d need well over a month to properly explore it all.

Technically BC is 944,735 km2 (364,764 sq mi), but this means nothing if you have no basis for comparison.

Even comparing BC’s area to the area of somewhere else means very little, until you visualize it… so I figured, what the heck! Let’s visualize these comparisons using MAPfrappe*.



Here’s British Columbia, outlined by yours truly.

As you can see, BC is larger than the UK (243,600 km²) and Ireland (84,420 km²).

It’s bigger than Japan (377,900km2).

It’s bigger than New Zealand (268,700 km²).

It can eat all of California (424,000 km²).

It can swallow Florida (170,300 km²) and its neighbouring states.

* MAPfrappe is an online tool that allows you to draw an outline of one part of the world (ex: the outline of BC) and overlay it on another part of the world (ex: Japan), so you can properly visualize how it compares. And yes, for you cartography gurus, it does factor scale and projection distortion and makes the appropriate changes, so it’s more or less accurate. You can read more about the details on their website.

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