Saint Lucia 🇱🇨

Saint Lucia is a country in the Caribbean, one of the 28 entries this site files under that subregion. Its seat of government is Castries.

It covers 616 km², which ranks it 197th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Micronesia and just ahead of the Isle of Man. For scale, it is around a fifth smaller than Singapore.

It is home to roughly 179,744 people, placing it 189th of 249 by population — between Samoa above it and Guam below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 12th of 28 in size and 11th in population.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Saint Lucia ranks 197th of 249 by area and 189th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Saint Lucia in the size ordering are Micronesia at 702 km² and Isle of Man at 572 km², against Saint Lucia's 616 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Saint Lucia averages 292 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 48th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 13.9° north, 61.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,545 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Sudan, Chad and Yemen — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

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, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Saint Lucia 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 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, roughly 75 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 Lucia's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 292 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Saint Lucia is a Saint Lucian.

English is the only official language. Another 90 entries list English too — among them American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 33rd most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and Saint Lucia sits 11th of 28 by population and 12th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Barbados just above and Curaçao 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.

• 🇧🇧 Barbados
• 🇨🇼 Curaçao
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

Saint Lucia does not have the Eastern Caribbean dollar to itself. It is one of 8 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XCD, 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 XCD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Saint Lucia 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.

The currency is the Eastern Caribbean dollar ($, XCD). Another 7 entries use the same currency — Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada and Montserrat among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Saint Lucia.

Its internet country code is .lc. Calls from overseas start with +1758. Standard country codes: lc and LCA.

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

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.