Heard Island and McDonald Islands 🇭🇲

Heard Island and McDonald Islands is a territory in the Antarctic, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. It has no capital city listed, which is normal for an entry of this kind.

It has no permanent residents at all. Among the 5 entries in the Antarctic it ranks 4th by area and 5th by population.

It covers 412 km², which ranks it 208th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Barbados and just ahead of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. That makes it around a quarter larger than Malta.

Its reference point sits at 53.1° south and 72.5° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 5,911 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and Bouvet Island.

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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranks 208th of 250 by area and 250th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 250 entries and a negligible share of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Heard Island and McDonald Islands in the size ordering are Barbados at 430 km² and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha at 394 km², against Heard Island and McDonald Islands's 412 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands 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 French Southern and Antarctic Lands, roughly 490 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.

Being surrounded by water rather than by neighbours pushes a country's relationships outward. Réunion, Mauritius and Madagascar sit in a different world region from Heard Island and McDonald Islands yet rank among its closest geographic company — the kind of pairing that only shows up once you stop thinking in continents.

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 Heard Island and McDonald Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands 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.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands holds 2 of the five markers of separate administration tracked here, but not all of them: it has no currency, dialling code and capital of its own. That mix is typical of a territory that manages some functions locally and leaves others to the state that administers it.

• Its own currencynone listed
• Its own dialling codenone listed
• Its own internet domain.hm
• Its own ISO codeshm / HMD
• A designated capitalnone listed