Sint Maarten 🇸🇽

Sint Maarten sits in the Caribbean and is listed as a dependency rather than an independent state. The short and official forms of the name are the same. Philipsburg is the capital.

By land area it covers 34 km², which ranks it 240th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the United States Minor Outlying Islands and just ahead of Macau. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is around a quarter larger than Tuvalu.

Around 43,350 people live there, placing it 214th of 249 by population — between the Northern Mariana Islands above it and Liechtenstein below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 27th by area and 22nd by population.

Sint Maarten 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. Sint Maarten 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 currencyANG
• Its own dialling code+1721
• Its own internet domain.sx
• Its own ISO codessx / SXM
• A designated capitalPhilipsburg

The coordinates the dataset gives are 18.0° N, 63.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,007 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.

Its land neighbours number 1: Saint Martin.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Spread across 34 km², that works out at about 1,275 people per square kilometre, which makes it among the most densely populated places on earth. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Someone from Sint Maarten is a St. Maartener.

3 languages carry official status: Dutch, English and French. Dutch, the first listed, is shared with 6 other entries worldwide.

Inside the Americas it places 46th of 55 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Sint Maarten does not have the Netherlands Antillean guilder to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is ANG, and the other one is 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 ANG travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Sint Maarten 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 Sint Maarten sits 22nd of 28 by population and 27th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Turks and Caicos Islands just above and British Virgin Islands 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.

• 🇹🇨 Turks and Caicos Islands
• 🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

The currency is the Netherlands Antillean guilder (ƒ, ANG). It shares that currency with Curaçao.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Sint Maarten, the answer is Philipsburg.

Its internet country code is .sx. To phone it from abroad you dial +1721. Standard country codes: sx and SXM.

Sint Maarten 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.