16 countries where the largest city is not the capital

How to choose the capital? Often they become by default the largest cities in the country. However, this does not always happen: in more than thirty countries that exist today, the situation is completely different, and the country's largest city is not always its largest metropolis. Take, for example, the USA: Washington, by its size, is more attracted to a provincial city, in which fewer than seven hundred thousand people live. And this means that it is smaller than Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Krasnodar and does not at all reach Moscow and St. Petersburg. America’s largest cities are several times larger than Washington: only four million people live in Los Angeles alone, and 8.6 million in New York.

And the US is not one of a kind. When the government is faced with the question of which city of the country to make the main one, unconventional solutions are often found. In particular, in the USA Philadelphia and New York claimed the title of capital, and as a result, they decided to build the main city from scratch. And so Washington appeared. There are other situations when the capital is not in one city, but in several. So, Tokyo, for example, consists of 62 settlements of different scales.