Fiji 🇫🇯

Fiji is a country in Melanesia, one of the 5 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is Republic of Fiji. Its seat of government is Suva.

The land area is 18,272 km², which ranks it 157th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind New Caledonia and just ahead of Kuwait. For scale, it is about half again the size of Qatar.

The population is about 928,784, placing it 161st of 249 by population — between Djibouti above it and Réunion below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 4th of 5 in size and 2nd in population.

Fiji 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 Vanuatu, roughly 880 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 Fiji's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 18.0° S, 175.0° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,004 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Bolivia, Mozambique and Madagascar 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 249 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 51 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

People from Fiji are called Fijians.

Officially it is multilingual, listing English, Fiji Hindi and Fijian. Fiji Hindi and Fijian are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Fiji. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Against Oceania as a whole it is the 4th most populous of 27 entries, and it accounts for 7.2% of everyone living in Melanesia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Fiji ranks 157th of 249 by area and 161st by population. That works out at 0.012% 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 Fiji in the size ordering are New Caledonia at 18,575 km² and Kuwait at 17,818 km², against Fiji's 18,272 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Fiji averages 51 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 165th 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 Fijian dollar (FJD) is used only in Fiji 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. English is listed for 91 entries here, Fiji 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 Fijian dollar ($, FJD). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Suva is the city to remember for this country.

Websites there use the .fj domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +679. Its ISO codes are fj and FJI, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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 Melanesia and Fiji sits 2nd of 5 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Papua New Guinea just above and Solomon Islands just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea
• 🇸🇧 Solomon Islands
• 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea