Saint Barthélemy 🇧🇱

Saint Barthélemy belongs to the Caribbean, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. The long form of the name is Collectivity of Saint Barthélemy. Gustavia is the capital.

By land area it covers 21 km², which ranks it 245th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Nauru and just ahead of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Nauru.

Around 11,000 people live there, placing it 230th of 250 by population — between Wallis and Futuna above it and Tuvalu below. Within the Caribbean alone it is the 28th largest of 28 and the 27th most populous.

Saint Barthélemy 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. Saint Barthélemy 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+590
• Its own internet domain.bl
• Its own ISO codesbl / BLM
• A designated capitalGustavia

Plotted on a globe it falls at 18.5° north, 63.4° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,059 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach India, Mali and Mauritania — 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.

Saint Barthélemy 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 Anguilla, roughly 40 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 Saint Barthélemy's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 524 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

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

People from Saint Barthélemy are called Saint Barthélemy Islanders.

Inside the Americas it places 52nd of 56 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Saint Barthélemy 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, Saint Barthélemy 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 Saint Barthélemy sits 27th of 28 by population and 28th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Anguilla just above and Montserrat 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.

• 🇦🇮 Anguilla
• 🇲🇸 Montserrat
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

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

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

The top-level domain is .bl. To phone it from abroad you dial +590. Its ISO codes are bl and BLM, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Saint Barthélemy 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.