Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha 🇸🇭

Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha sits in Western Africa and is listed as a dependency rather than an independent state. The short and official forms of the name are the same. The capital is Jamestown.

Some 5,300 people call it home, placing it 233rd of 250 by population — between Saint Pierre and Miquelon above it and Montserrat below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 17th by area and 17th by population.

Its territory runs to 394 km², which ranks it 209th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Heard Island and McDonald Islands and just ahead of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is around a quarter larger than Malta.

Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha 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 193 member states while still appearing among the 250 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. Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha 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 currencyGBP, SHP
• Its own dialling code+2
• Its own internet domain.sh
• Its own ISO codessh / SHN
• A designated capitalJamestown

Plotted on a globe it falls at 15.9° south, 5.7° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,776 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Bolivia, Zambia and Vanuatu — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

No land border connects it to another territory. That puts it among the 85 entries of 250 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha 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 São Tomé and Príncipe, roughly 2,300 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 Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Spread across 394 km², that works out at about 13 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

English is the only official language. English is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 90 other entries including American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

People from Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha are called Saint Helenians.

Inside Africa it places 58th of 59 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha does not have the Pound sterling to itself. It is one of 6 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is GBP, 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 GBP travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha 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 Western Africa, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha is the least populous of the 17 entries listed here, and 17th by area. Cape Verde 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.

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

• 🇨🇻 Cape Verde
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

More than one currency circulates: Pound sterling (GBP) and Saint Helena pound (SHP). It shares that currency with Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe.

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

The top-level domain is .sh. Its ISO codes are sh and SHN, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.