The covering type of closed surfaces and minimal triangulations

The notion of covering type was recently introduced by Karoubi and Weibel to measure the complexity of a topological space by means of good coverings. When X has the homotopy type of a finite CW-complex, its covering type coincides with the minimum possible number of vertices of a simplicial complex homotopy equivalent to X. In this article we compute the covering type of all closed surfaces. Our results completely settle a problem posed by Karoubi and Weibel, and shed more light on the relationship between the topology of surfaces and the number of vertices of minimal triangulations from a homotopy point of view.