The Nine Countries That Can't Agree on One Capital City

Bolivia's Supreme Court sits in Sucre. Its president, its congress and most of its ministries sit in La Paz. By the country's own constitution, La Paz isn't even the capital. Sucre is, though almost nobody outside Bolivia could name it.

Bolivia isn't an outlier, and the arrangement is older and stranger than it looks from the outside. Nine countries currently split their capital duties across two or more cities, according to World Population Review's tally of current arrangements: Bolivia, Burundi, Czechia, Ivory Coast, Eswatini, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Each split happened for its own reason, but the reasons cluster into a small set of patterns: compromise after conflict, colonial-era leftovers, and cities that simply got too crowded to run a government from.

Why do some countries have two capitals?

Bolivia's split dates to the Federal War of 1898-99, when liberal forces from La Paz defeated the conservative, centralist government based in Sucre. Since that victory, La Paz has held the country's legislative, executive and electoral power, while Sucre kept the judiciary. The Supreme Court of Justice still sits there, according to LatinAmerican Post.

South Africa's three-way split traces to a different kind of compromise. Pretoria serves as the administrative and executive capital, Cape Town holds Parliament as the legislative capital, and Bloemfontein, sitting near the country's geographic center, is the judicial capital, hosting the Supreme Court of Appeals. Pretoria carried that administrative role through the apartheid era; the arrangement itself dates to the 1910 unification of Britain's southern African colonies, when no single city could claim national dominance.

Eswatini's version is a colonial hangover. Mbabane, the administrative capital and home to the Central Bank, grew in importance under British administration late in the colonial period. Lobamba, the older seat of regional power, kept the legislature and remains the royal capital, home to King Mswati III, the country's absolute monarch.

Malaysia's split is newer and more deliberate. Kuala Lumpur has been the kingdom's capital and most important city since long before independence, but by 1999 overcrowding had gotten bad enough that the federal government moved into Putrajaya, a planned administrative city built from scratch about 40 kilometers south. Kuala Lumpur kept its status as the constitutional and legislative capital.

Which countries currently split their capital?

A few more arrangements round out the list. The Netherlands names Amsterdam its official capital, but the government, Parliament and the country's courts all operate out of The Hague. Sri Lanka keeps Colombo as its executive and judicial capital while Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, a few miles away in the same metro area, holds the legislature. Burundi splits political power in Gitega from economic power in Bujumbura. Benin's official, legislative capital is Porto-Novo, a former hub of the colonial-era slave trade, while Cotonou, the country's most populous city, runs as the de facto seat of government. Czechia built its capital in Prague back in the 9th century, but the country's Supreme Court has operated out of Brno ever since Czechoslovakia's founding. Ivory Coast lists both cities on its own list of one: Abidjan runs day-to-day government business as the de facto administrative capital, while Yamoussoukro, the boyhood home of the country's first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, holds the official title.

Divided capitals are one kind of administrative anomaly. Outright disputes over what counts as a country in the first place are another. Daybreak Wire has covered why the Vatican has never applied to join the United Nations and why Northern Cyprus is recognized as a country by almost no one but Turkey, different flavors of the same underlying problem: sovereignty rarely fits the tidy boxes governments try to draw around it.

None of these arrangements looks likely to resolve soon, either. Sri Lanka's original, long-standing plan was to move its capital entirely to Kotte and let Colombo become a purely commercial city. It hasn't happened. Instead, the same kind of unfinished compromise that left a legislature in The Hague, a Supreme Court in Bloemfontein and a king in Lobamba while the money moved to Mbabane just keeps holding. Nine countries are running on two capitals each because, in practice, that turned out easier than picking one.