Martinique 🇲🇶

Martinique belongs to the Caribbean, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. Fort-de-France is the capital.

By land area it covers 1,128 km², which ranks it 188th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the Faroe Islands and just ahead of Hong Kong. For scale, it is about half again the size of Singapore.

Around 360,000 people live there, placing it 181st of 250 by population — between Guadeloupe above it and Vanuatu below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 9th of 28 in size and 9th in population.

Martinique 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. Martinique 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+596
• Its own internet domain.mq
• Its own ISO codesmq / MTQ
• A designated capitalFort-de-France

Its reference point sits at 14.7° north and 61.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,633 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Sudan, Chad and Niger.

It shares no land border with anyone. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, so everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air.

Martinique 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 Saint Lucia, roughly 85 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 Martinique's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 319 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

People from Martinique are called Martinicans.

The one official language is French. French is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 45 other entries including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

Inside the Americas it places 31st of 56 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Martinique 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. French is listed for 46 entries here, Martinique 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 Martinique sits 9th of 28 by population and 9th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Guadeloupe just above and Barbados 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.

• 🇬🇵 Guadeloupe
• 🇧🇧 Barbados
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

It uses the Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

Fort-de-France is the city to remember for this territory.

The top-level domain is .mq. To phone it from abroad you dial +596. Its ISO codes are mq and MTQ, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Martinique is not a UN member state. 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.