South Georgia 🇬🇸

South Georgia is one of the territories of the Antarctic that appears on world lists without being a UN member state. Its full official name is South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Its seat of government is King Edward Point.

Its recorded population is just 30, among the smallest anywhere. Among the 5 entries in the Antarctic it ranks 3rd by area and 3rd by population.

The land area is 3,903 km², which ranks it 179th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Cape Verde and just ahead of Samoa. That makes it about half again the size of Luxembourg.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 54.5° S, 37.0° W, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 6,067 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Heard Island and McDonald Islands and Bouvet Island.

It shares no land border with anyone. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

Put next to every other entry on this site, South Georgia ranks 179th of 250 by area and 248th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 250 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent 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 South Georgia in the size ordering are Cape Verde at 4,033 km² and Samoa at 2,842 km², against South Georgia's 3,903 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. South Georgia averages 0 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it among the emptiest places on the list — 247th of the 248 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

South Georgia 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 Falkland Islands, roughly 1,490 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. Falkland Islands, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile sit in a different world region from South Georgia 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 South Georgia's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

South Georgia 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. South Georgia 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 currencySHP
• Its own dialling code+500
• Its own internet domain.gs
• Its own ISO codesgs / SGS
• A designated capitalKing Edward Point