The Hunger Games takes place on which continent?

The Hunger Games takes place on the continent of North America. The story is set in Panem, a post-apocalyptic nation built from the remnants of what was once North America. Much of the continent has been transformed by environmental disasters, including flooding and other upheavals, so Panem does not match the modern political map exactly.

Panem is ruled by the Capitol, located in the Rocky Mountains, and is divided into districts that supply resources to the ruling city. Katniss Everdeen comes from District 12, a coal-producing region associated with Appalachia. The districts’ locations are suggested rather than mapped with complete precision, and author Suzanne Collins has intentionally left some geography open to interpretation.

A common mix-up is answering “Panem,” but Panem is the fictional country, not the continent. North America is the underlying continent; the United States, Canada, and Mexico no longer exist in their present forms within the story’s setting. The series does not clearly establish what happened to every other continent or whether other nations survived.