What Is the Youngest Capital City in the World?

Actually, the youngest capital city in the world is built very recently, in 2006. But its close competitors are not much older.

The following capital cities are the youngest in the world:

  1. Ngerulmud, the capital of Palau.
  2. Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar.
  3. Putrajaya, the capital of Malaysia. 

The ranking in the list is according to an article on Wikipedia. All these capitals are purposely bult as capitals.

The cities are marked in the interactive map below. The map is zoomable so you can see details. You will need this because Palau, as a country with its capital presented here, is so small that you have to zoom a lot to see it on the map.

Ngerulmud

Ngerulmud, the capital of Palau.
Ngerulmud, the capital of Palau.

This city of Palau became the capital of the country in 2006 when the capital is officially moved here from Koror City.

Note also that Ngerulmud is the smallest capital in the world and presented in my separate text. It is also in the text about newly declared capitals.

Anyhow, this is a capital city with just a few government buildings and a population of a few hundreds if people, quite remarkable. Please see more here:

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Naypyidaw

Naypyidaw Myanmar.
Naypyidaw Myanmar.

This is the third largest city in Myanmar. It is unique in the country because it is entirely planned, and it belongs to its own territory. The picture shows the ministry zone and it is from Wikimedia. The original source is here.

It replaced Yangon as the administrative capital of Myanmar in 2005. As a planned city, it is very large but with a population below one million. Please see more about the city in this video:

and a bit more here as well:

Putrajaya

This city (shown in the top picture above) is mentioned also in my another text with countries that have more than one capital. So indeed, it shares the power with Kuala Lumpur.

This is again a planned city and the government seat was moved there in 1999. It became the seat of the judiciary of Malaysia in 2003. But in the text on Wikipedia you will see that 2002 is mentioned as the year when it became one of the two capitals.

Here is more about the city:

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But see also this video:

So this was the list of the youngest capital cities in the world, and you realize that they are indeed incredibly young in every sense. All of them are planned cities and each peculiar in its own way.

Thank you for reading. Please bookmark this site and keep as a reference, it is all about capitals and you will always find new texts added here.

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