Christmas Island 🇨🇽

Christmas Island is a territory in Australia and New Zealand, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Treaties and official documents call it Territory of Christmas Island. Its seat of government is Flying Fish Cove.

The land area is 135 km², which ranks it 228th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Wallis and Futuna and just ahead of Jersey. For scale, it is around a fifth smaller than Liechtenstein.

Its recorded population is just 1,700, among the smallest anywhere. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 3rd of 5 in size and 4th in population.

Christmas 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.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Christmas Island 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 currencyAUD
• Its own dialling code+61
• Its own internet domain.cx
• Its own ISO codescx / CXR
• A designated capitalFlying Fish Cove

The coordinates the dataset gives are 10.5° S, 105.7° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,169 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Brazil, Peru and Angola sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

Christmas 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 Cocos (Keeling) Islands, roughly 990 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. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei sit in a different world region from Christmas 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 Christmas Island's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 13 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 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.

People from Christmas Island are called Christmas Islanders.

Against Oceania as a whole it is the 24th most populous of 27 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Australia and New Zealand.

Christmas Island does not have the Australian dollar to itself. It is one of 7 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is AUD, 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 AUD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Christmas Island 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 Australia and New Zealand and Christmas Island sits 4th of 5 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Norfolk Island just above and Cocos (Keeling) Islands just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇳🇫 Norfolk Island
• 🇨🇨 Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• 🇦🇺 Australia

It uses the Australian dollar ($, AUD). Another 6 entries use the same currency — Australia, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and Norfolk Island among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Christmas Island.

The top-level domain is .cx. To phone it from abroad you dial +61. Its ISO codes are cx and CXR, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Christmas Island, the answer is Flying Fish Cove.

Christmas Island is not a UN member state. It uses Australia's currency and issues none of its own, which is the usual mark of a dependency. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.