British Indian Ocean Territory 🇮🇴

The British Indian Ocean Territory belongs to Eastern Africa, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. The short and official forms of the name are the same. Diego Garcia is the capital.

By land area it covers 60 km², which ranks it 234th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind San Marino and just ahead of Bermuda. That makes it almost exactly the same size as San Marino.

Its recorded population is just 3,000, among the smallest anywhere. Among the 20 entries in Eastern Africa it ranks 20th by area and 20th by population.

British Indian Ocean Territory 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. British Indian Ocean Territory 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 currencyUSD
• Its own dialling code+246
• Its own internet domain.io
• Its own ISO codesio / IOT
• A designated capitalDiego Garcia

Its reference point sits at 6.0° south and 71.5° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 668 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Indonesia, Tanzania and Papua New Guinea.

No land border connects it to another territory. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, so everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air.

British Indian Ocean Territory 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 Maldives, roughly 1,040 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. Maldives and Sri Lanka sit in a different world region from British Indian Ocean Territory 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 British Indian Ocean Territory's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 50 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

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

People from the British Indian Ocean Territory are called Indians.

Inside Africa it places 59th of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

British Indian Ocean Territory does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 20 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, British Indian Ocean Territory 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.

Within Eastern Africa, British Indian Ocean Territory is the least populous of the 20 entries listed here, and 20th by area. Seychelles is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

Ethiopia is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Eastern Africa has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇸🇨 Seychelles
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

Money there is the United States dollar ($, USD). That is a shared currency: 19 other entries use it, including American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, Cambodia and the Caribbean Netherlands.

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

Websites there use the .io domain. Calls from overseas start with +246. Its ISO codes are io and IOT, which is what most databases and flag files use.

On the UN list it does not appear as a member. Its official name points to the United Kingdom as the administering state. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.