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Maseru, capital of Lesotho: facts and figures

Updated 28 August 2026 · 3 min read · DailyGeo team

Key figures

Climate through the year

Maseru averages 8.2 °C in winter and 20.1 °C in summer. July is the coldest month of the year and January the warmest, and the city receives 694 mm of precipitation in an average year.

What makes it stand out

• Winter: coldest capital in Africa (8.2 °C).
• Latitude: southernmost capital in Africa (29.31°).

Nearest capitals

Distances are great-circle distances between city centres, which is what the Capitals game measures when it tells you how far a guess was from the answer. Pretoria is the closest capital to Maseru.

How to remember it

Reading a figure once rarely fixes it in memory. Attach Maseru to a place and a number you already know: it is 402 km from Pretoria, and it is the 148th largest capital in the atlas. Then practise retrieving it. DailyGeo Capitals gives you one mystery capital a day with distance, direction, language and population clues, the memorising method explains the review schedule, and the capitals index lists all 172.

To see how Lesotho compares with every other country on figures like these, the richest countries by GDP per capita ranks them on geopolitix, a country-ranking game by the same maker as DailyGeo.

Sources

• City population and coordinates: DailyGeo's own game data, the same figures the Capitals game plays with. Population follows the urban area rather than the commune, which is why no density is quoted.
• Temperature and rainfall: ten-year means (2015 to 2024) computed from ERA5 reanalysis, retrieved through Open-Meteo. Hersbach, H., et al. (2020). The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.
• Elevation: terrain height at the city's coordinates in the Copernicus DEM, read through Open-Meteo rather than taken from a curated claim.
• Time zone: resolved from the same coordinates.
• Country figures: the World Bank, latest reported year for each series: Country GDP, GDP per capita, Country population, Life expectancy, Internet users.
• Founding date: Wikidata, earliest recorded founding claim.
• This capital elsewhere: Wikipedia, UNdata, Wikidata.
• Method and limits: How this data was collected explains how each figure was collected and what it does not cover.

The short answer

Keep learning

• Pretoria, capital of South Africa: facts and figures

  Pretoria is the capital of South Africa: 2,500,000 residents, 1,327 m above sea level, 13.3 °C in winter and 22.0 °C in summer. Key figures and sources.

• Gaborone, capital of Botswana: facts and figures

  Gaborone is the capital of Botswana: 270,000 residents, 1,002 m above sea level, 15.2 °C in winter and 25.7 °C in summer. Key figures and sources.

• Maputo, capital of Mozambique: facts and figures

  Maputo is the capital of Mozambique: 1,100,000 residents, 9 m above sea level, 19.9 °C in winter and 25.9 °C in summer. Key figures and sources.

• Capitals of the world: the full list by continent

  Every capital in DailyGeo's atlas, grouped by continent, with population, elevation and winter and summer temperatures, each linking to its own data page.