New Caledonia 🇳🇨

New Caledonia belongs to Melanesia, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. Nouméa is the capital.

By land area it covers 18,575 km², which ranks it 156th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Slovenia and just ahead of Fiji. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is about half again the size of Qatar.

Around 292,639 people live there, placing it 184th of 249 by population — between French Guiana above it and Barbados below. Among the 5 entries in Melanesia it ranks 3rd by area and 5th by population.

New Caledonia 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. New Caledonia 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+687
• Its own internet domain.nc
• Its own ISO codesnc / NCL
• A designated capitalNouméa

The coordinates the dataset gives are 21.5° S, 165.5° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,393 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Namibia, Madagascar and Botswana sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

No land border connects it to another territory. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

New Caledonia 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 630 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 New Caledonia's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Spread across 18,575 km², that works out at about 16 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.

People from New Caledonia are called New Caledonians.

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

Inside Oceania it places 7th of 27 by population, and it accounts for 2.3% of everyone living in Melanesia.

New Caledonia 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, New Caledonia 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 Melanesia, New Caledonia is the least populous of the 5 entries listed here, and 3rd by area. Vanuatu is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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.

• 🇻🇺 Vanuatu
• 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea

Money there is the CFP franc (₣, XPF). It shares that currency with French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna.

Websites there use the .nc domain. The international dialling code is +687. Its ISO codes are nc and NCL, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Nouméa is the city to remember for this territory.

It does not hold a UN seat of its own. 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.