Mayotte 🇾🇹

Mayotte belongs to Eastern Africa, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. In formal use it is Department of Mayotte. Mamoudzou is the capital.

Around 320,000 people live there, placing it 182nd of 249 by population — between Vanuatu above it and French Guiana below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 19th of 20 in size and 18th in population.

By land area it covers 374 km², which ranks it 210th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and just ahead of the United States Virgin Islands. For scale, it is around a quarter larger than Malta.

Mayotte 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. Mayotte 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 currencyEUR
• Its own dialling code+262
• Its own internet domain.yt
• Its own ISO codesyt / MYT
• A designated capitalMamoudzou

Plotted on a globe it falls at 12.8° south, 45.2° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,429 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Samoa, American Samoa and Wallis and Futuna — 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 249 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

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

Density comes out at around 856 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Mayotte is a Mahoran.

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

Inside Africa it places 55th of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Mayotte does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, 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 EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Mayotte 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 Eastern Africa and Mayotte sits 18th of 20 by population and 19th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Comoros just above and Seychelles 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.

• 🇰🇲 Comoros
• 🇸🇨 Seychelles
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

The currency is the Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

Its internet country code is .yt. To phone it from abroad you dial +262. Standard country codes: yt and MYT.

Mamoudzou is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Mayotte is not a UN member state. The dataset does not record which state administers it, so this page does not guess. Of the 249 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.