Cocos (Keeling) Islands 🇨🇨

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands 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 the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Government sits in West Island.

Its recorded population is just 600, among the smallest anywhere. Among the 5 entries in Australia and New Zealand it ranks 5th by area and 5th by population.

It covers 14 km², which ranks it 246th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Saint Barthélemy and just ahead of Tokelau. That makes it about two thirds the size of Nauru.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 12.5° south, 96.8° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,392 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Angola, Malawi and Samoa — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It shares no land border with anyone. 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, Cocos (Keeling) Islands ranks 246th of 250 by area and 244th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 250 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 Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the size ordering are Saint Barthélemy at 21 km² and Tokelau at 12 km², against Cocos (Keeling) Islands's 14 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Cocos (Keeling) Islands averages 43 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 178th of the 248 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.

Cocos (Keeling) 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 Christmas Island, 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 Cocos (Keeling) Islands 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 Cocos (Keeling) Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Cocos (Keeling) 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. Cocos (Keeling) 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 currencyAUD
• Its own dialling code+61
• Its own internet domain.cc
• Its own ISO codescc / CCK
• A designated capitalWest Island