Comoros 🇰🇲

The Comoros is a country in Eastern Africa, one of the 20 entries this site files under that subregion. Treaties and official documents call it Union of the Comoros. Government sits in Moroni.

The population is about 866,628, placing it 163rd of 249 by population — between Réunion above it and Guyana below. Within Eastern Africa alone it is the 17th largest of 20 and the 17th most populous.

The land area is 1,862 km², which ranks it 183rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Mauritius and just ahead of Guadeloupe. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is around a fifth smaller than Luxembourg.

Comoros 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 Mayotte, roughly 125 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 Comoros's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 12.2° south, 44.3° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,354 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

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

No land border connects it to another country. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 465 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

3 languages carry official status: Arabic, Comorian and French. Comorian is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to the Comoros. Arabic, the first listed, is shared with 24 other entries worldwide.

People from the Comoros are called Comorans.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 52nd most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Comoros ranks 183rd of 249 by area and 163rd by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.011% 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 Comoros in the size ordering are Mauritius at 2,040 km² and Guadeloupe at 1,628 km², against Comoros's 1,862 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Comoros averages 465 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 30th of the 247 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.

The Comorian franc (KMF) is used only in Comoros among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Comoros 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.

Money there is the Comorian franc (Fr, KMF). It shares that currency with.

Websites there use the .km domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +269. Its ISO codes are km and COM, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of the Comoros, the answer is Moroni.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Comoros sits 17th of 20 by population and 17th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Réunion just above and Mayotte just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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.

• 🇷🇪 Réunion
• 🇾🇹 Mayotte
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia