Curaçao 🇨🇼

Curaçao is a territory in the Caribbean, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Treaties and official documents call it Country of Curaçao. Government sits in Willemstad.

The population is about 155,967, placing it 192nd of 250 by population — between Guam above it and Kiribati below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 13th by area and 12th by population.

The land area is 444 km², which ranks it 205th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Seychelles and just ahead of Antigua and Barbuda. That makes it about half again the size of Malta.

Curaçao 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. Curaçao 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 currencyANG
• Its own dialling code+599
• Its own internet domain.cw
• Its own ISO codescw / CUW
• A designated capitalWillemstad

Plotted on a globe it falls at 12.1° north, 68.9° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,349 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

The Philippines, Burkina Faso and Guinea sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

No land border connects it to another territory. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Curaçao 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 Caribbean Netherlands, 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 Curaçao's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 351 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

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

People from Curaçao are called Curaçaoans.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 35th most populous of 56 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Curaçao does not have the Netherlands Antillean guilder to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is ANG, and the other one is 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 ANG travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Curaçao 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 Curaçao sits 12th of 28 by population and 13th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Saint Lucia just above and Grenada 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.

• 🇱🇨 Saint Lucia
• 🇬🇩 Grenada
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

Money there is the Netherlands Antillean guilder (ƒ, ANG). It shares that currency with Sint Maarten.

Websites there use the .cw domain. The international dialling code is +599. Its ISO codes are cw and CUW, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Curaçao, the answer is Willemstad.

It does not hold a UN seat of its own. The dataset does not record which state administers it, so this page does not guess. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.