British Virgin Islands 🇻🇬

The British Virgin Islands is a territory in the Caribbean, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Treaties and official documents call it Virgin Islands. Government sits in Road Town.

It covers 151 km², which ranks it 226th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Liechtenstein and just ahead of Wallis and Futuna. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Liechtenstein.

It is home to roughly 39,471 people, placing it 217th of 250 by population — between Liechtenstein above it and Gibraltar below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 23rd by area and 23rd by population.

British Virgin Islands 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 Virgin Islands 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+1284
• Its own internet domain.vg
• Its own ISO codesvg / VGB
• A designated capitalRoad Town

The coordinates the dataset gives are 18.4° N, 64.6° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,052 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

India, Mali and Mauritania 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.

British Virgin Islands 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 United States Virgin Islands, roughly 35 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 British Virgin Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 261 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

The one official language is English. Another 90 entries list English too — among them American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

Someone from the British Virgin Islands is a Virgin Islander.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 48th most populous of 56 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

British Virgin Islands 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 Virgin Islands 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 British Virgin Islands sits 23rd of 28 by population and 23rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Sint Maarten just above and Caribbean Netherlands 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.

• 🇸🇽 Sint Maarten
• Caribbean Netherlands
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

The currency is the United States dollar ($, USD). Another 19 entries use the same currency — American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, Cambodia and the Caribbean Netherlands among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with the British Virgin Islands.

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

Its internet country code is .vg. To phone it from abroad you dial +1284. Standard country codes: vg and VGB.

The British Virgin Islands is not a UN member state. 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.