California, with nearly 40 million people and the world's sixth largest economy, often blows us away with its cultural and economic impacts. But what about its geography? It's the second largest of the contiguous United States. The folks at SelfStorage.com recently tried to figure out what countries would fit inside the Golden State.

“Imagine if you could take that 155,779 square miles of land and use it as a storage container,” a spokesman said. “Can you believe that California is the size of the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Kosovo and Czech Republic combined.”

California's geographic size ranks it 59th if it were a nation, the analysis found. There are 141 countries that could each fit inside the Golden State. This is a look at some of the more interesting ones:

The United Kingdom could fit inside more than one and a half times, the site found. Japan and Maryland could cozy up inside Cali together. Vietnam, Italy, Norway and the Philippines could take up California about 1.3 or so times, SelfStorage.com says.

You could get 12.5 Taiwans inside the state. Paraguay, at 153,399 square miles, is the country closest to the size of the Golden State, according to the analysis.

The site used map tool thetruesize.com, which uses Google Maps but also accounts for global curvature and geographic distortion to assess the true size of nations. (Click image below to see maps.)

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Via SelfStorage.com California

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