  We introduce the notion of tropical area of a tropical curve defined in an
open subset of $\mathbb R^n$. We prove that the number of vertices of a
tropical curve is bounded by the area of the curve. The approach is totally
elementary yet tricky. Our proof employs ideas from intersection theory in
algebraic geometry. The result can be interpreted as the fact that the moduli
space of tropical curves with bounded area is of finite type.
