Bahamas 🇧🇸

Filed under the Americas and more precisely the Caribbean, the Bahamas is a sovereign state. The long form of the name is Commonwealth of the Bahamas. Nassau is the capital.

By land area it covers 13,943 km², which ranks it 161st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Timor-Leste and just ahead of Montenegro. For scale, it is around a quarter larger than Qatar.

Around 401,283 people live there, placing it 177th of 249 by population — between Belize above it and Iceland below. Within the Caribbean alone it is the 4th largest of 28 and the 7th most populous.

Bahamas 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 Cuba, roughly 510 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 Bahamas's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Its reference point sits at 24.3° north and 76.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,700 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Saudi Arabia, Libya and Western Sahara.

No land border connects it to another country. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, so everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air.

Spread across 13,943 km², that works out at about 29 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

People from the Bahamas are called Bahamians.

English is the only official language. English is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 90 other entries including American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

Inside the Americas it places 28th of 55 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Bahamas ranks 161st of 249 by area and 177th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 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 Bahamas in the size ordering are Timor-Leste at 14,874 km² and Montenegro at 13,812 km², against Bahamas's 13,943 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Bahamas averages 29 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 190th of the 247 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.

Bahamas does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 19 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, 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 USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Bahamas 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.

More than one currency circulates: Bahamian dollar (BSD) and United States dollar (USD). It is issued for the Bahamas alone.

If a quiz asks for the capital of the Bahamas, the answer is Nassau.

The top-level domain is .bs. Calls from overseas start with +1242. Its ISO codes are bs and BHS, which is what most databases and flag files use.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and Bahamas sits 7th of 28 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Trinidad and Tobago just above and Guadeloupe 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.

• 🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago
• 🇬🇵 Guadeloupe
• 🇭🇹 Haiti