Åland Islands 🇦🇽

The Åland Islands is a territory in Northern Europe, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Government sits in Mariehamn.

The population is about 30,500, placing it 222nd of 250 by population — between San Marino above it and the Caribbean Netherlands below. Within Northern Europe alone it is the 12th largest of 16 and the 15th most populous.

The land area is 1,580 km², which ranks it 186th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Guadeloupe and just ahead of the Faroe Islands. For scale, it is about two thirds the size of Luxembourg.

Åland 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.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Åland Islands 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 currencyEUR
• Its own dialling code+35818
• Its own internet domain.ax
• Its own ISO codesax / ALA
• A designated capitalMariehamn

Plotted on a globe it falls at 60.1° north, 19.9° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 6,692 km from the equator, in what geographers would call high-latitude latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Russia and Canada — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Åland 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 Sweden, roughly 340 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 Åland Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 19 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

Swedish is the only official language. It shares that with Finland and Sweden.

The demonym is Ålandish, so residents are Ålandish.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 51st most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Northern Europe.

Åland Islands does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, 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 EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Swedish is listed for 3 entries here, Åland Islands 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 Northern Europe and Åland Islands sits 15th of 16 by population and 12th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Faroe Islands just above and Svalbard and Jan Mayen just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇫🇴 Faroe Islands
• 🇸🇯 Svalbard and Jan Mayen
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

It uses the Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with the Åland Islands.

The top-level domain is .ax. Calls from overseas start with +35818. In ISO terms it is ax in two letters and ALA in three.

Mariehamn is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

On the UN list it does not appear as a member. 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.