French Polynesia 🇵🇫

French Polynesia belongs to Polynesia, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. The short and official forms of the name are the same. The capital is Papeetē.

Some 281,807 people call it home, placing it 186th of 249 by population — between Barbados above it and São Tomé and Príncipe below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 1st of 10 in size and 1st in population.

Its territory runs to 4,167 km², which ranks it 176th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Trinidad and Tobago and just ahead of Cape Verde. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is about half again the size of Luxembourg.

French Polynesia 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 192 member states while still appearing among the 249 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. French Polynesia 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 currencyXPF
• Its own dialling code+689
• Its own internet domain.pf
• Its own ISO codespf / PYF
• A designated capitalPapeetē

The coordinates the dataset gives are 15.0° S, 140.0° W, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,670 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Bolivia, Zambia and Malawi 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.

French Polynesia 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 Pitcairn Islands, roughly 1,520 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 French Polynesia's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 68 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: French. French is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 45 other entries including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

The demonym is French Polynesian, so residents are French Polynesians.

Inside Oceania it places 8th of 27 by population, and it accounts for 41% of everyone living in Polynesia.

French Polynesia does not have the CFP franc to itself. It is one of 3 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XPF, 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 XPF travels further than you might expect.

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

Within Polynesia, French Polynesia is the most populous of the 10 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Samoa is next in line by population.

Every entry in Polynesia has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Samoa is the place to carry on.

• 🇼🇸 Samoa
• 🇵🇫 French Polynesia

It uses the CFP franc (₣, XPF). It shares that currency with New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna.

Papeetē is the city to remember for this territory.

The top-level domain is .pf. To phone it from abroad you dial +689. In ISO terms it is pf in two letters and PYF in three.

French Polynesia is not a UN member state. Its official name points to France as the administering state. Of the 249 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.