Caribbean Netherlands

The Caribbean Netherlands is a territory in the Caribbean, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Treaties and official documents call it Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba. It has 3 capitals rather than one: Kralendijk, Oranjestad and The Bottom.

It is home to roughly 30,000 people, placing it 223rd of 250 by population — between the Åland Islands above it and Saint Martin below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 19th by area and 24th by population.

The land area is 328 km², which ranks it 214th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Grenada and just ahead of Malta. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is a little larger than Malta.

Caribbean Netherlands does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 193 member states while still appearing among the 250 entries on this site.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Caribbean Netherlands has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyUSD
• Its own dialling code+599
• Its own internet domain.bq
• Its own ISO codesbq / BES
• A designated capitalKralendijk, Oranjestad, The Bottom

Its reference point sits at 12.2° north and 68.3° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,356 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include the Philippines, Burkina Faso and Guinea.

No land border connects it to another territory. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, so everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air.

Caribbean Netherlands has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Curaçao, roughly 75 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Caribbean Netherlands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 91 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

3 languages carry official status: Dutch, English and Papiamento. Dutch, the first listed, is shared with 6 other entries worldwide.

The demonym is Dutch, so residents are Dutch.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 49th most populous of 56 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Caribbean Netherlands does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 20 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Caribbean Netherlands among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and Caribbean Netherlands sits 24th of 28 by population and 19th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is British Virgin Islands just above and Saint Martin just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Haiti is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Caribbean has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands
• 🇲🇫 Saint Martin
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

The currency is the United States dollar ($, USD). Another 19 entries use the same currency — American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands and Cambodia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with the Caribbean Netherlands.

Note that the Caribbean Netherlands splits capital functions across Kralendijk, Oranjestad and The Bottom, so "the capital" depends on which branch of government you mean.

Its internet country code is .bq. To phone it from abroad you dial +599. In ISO terms it is bq in two letters and BES in three.

The Caribbean Netherlands is not a UN member state. Its official name points to the Netherlands as the administering state. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.