Puerto Rico 🇵🇷

Puerto Rico belongs to the Caribbean, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. In formal use it is Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. San Juan is the capital.

By land area it covers 8,870 km², which ranks it 171st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Cyprus and just ahead of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. That makes it a fraction smaller than Cyprus.

Around 3.2 million people live there, placing it 134th of 249 by population — between Uruguay above it and Bosnia and Herzegovina below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 6th by area and 4th by population.

Puerto Rico 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. Puerto Rico 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 currencyUSD
• Its own dialling code+1
• Its own internet domain.pr
• Its own ISO codespr / PRI
• A designated capitalSan Juan

The coordinates the dataset gives are 18.3° N, 66.5° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,032 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

India, Mali and Mauritania 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.

Puerto Rico 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 United States Virgin Islands, roughly 165 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 Puerto Rico's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Spread across 8,870 km², that works out at about 361 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Puerto Rican, so residents are Puerto Ricans.

Officially it is multilingual, listing English and Spanish. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Inside the Americas it places 22nd of 55 by population, and it accounts for 7.2% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Puerto Rico does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 19 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is USD, 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 USD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Puerto Rico 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 Caribbean and Puerto Rico sits 4th of 28 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Cuba just above and Jamaica just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇺 Cuba
• 🇯🇲 Jamaica
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

The currency is the United States dollar ($, USD). That is a shared currency: 18 other entries use it, including American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands and Cambodia.

San Juan is the city to remember for this territory.

Its internet country code is .pr. The international dialling code is +1. In ISO terms it is pr in two letters and PRI in three.

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.