Bouvet Island 🇧🇻

Bouvet Island belongs to the Antarctic, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. No capital is recorded for it — there is no permanent seat of government to name.

Its territory runs to 49 km², which ranks it 237th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Saint Martin and just ahead of the Pitcairn Islands. For scale, it is around a fifth smaller than San Marino.

Nobody lives there permanently — the dataset records no resident population. Within the Antarctic alone it is the 5th largest of 5 and the 4th most populous.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 54.4° S, 3.4° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 6,060 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

South Georgia and Heard Island and McDonald Islands sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

No land border connects it to another territory. 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, Bouvet Island ranks 237th of 250 by area and 249th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 250 entries and a negligible share 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 Bouvet Island in the size ordering are Saint Martin at 53 km² and Pitcairn Islands at 47 km², against Bouvet Island's 49 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Bouvet Island 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 South Georgia, roughly 2,600 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. South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia and Eswatini sit in a different world region from Bouvet Island 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 Bouvet Island's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Bouvet Island 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.

Bouvet Island holds 3 of the five markers of separate administration tracked here, but not all of them: it has no currency and capital of its own. That mix is typical of a territory that manages some functions locally and leaves others to the state that administers it.

• Its own currencynone listed
• Its own dialling code+47
• Its own internet domain.bv
• Its own ISO codesbv / BVT
• A designated capitalnone listed