Solomon Islands 🇸🇧

Filed under Oceania and more precisely Melanesia, the Solomon Islands is a sovereign state. Its seat of government is Honiara.

The population is about 819,198, placing it 165th of 249 by population — between Guyana above it and Bhutan below. Among the 5 entries in Melanesia it ranks 2nd by area and 3rd by population.

It covers 28,896 km², which ranks it 144th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Armenia and just ahead of Albania. That makes it a fraction smaller than Belgium.

Solomon Islands 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 Nauru, roughly 1,210 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 Solomon Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 8.0° south, 159.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 891 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Brazil, Peru and Tanzania — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It shares no land border with anyone. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Density comes out at around 28 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 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Solomon Islander, so residents are Solomon Islanders.

Officially it is monolingual: English. Another 90 entries list English too — among them American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

Against Oceania as a whole it is the 5th most populous of 27 entries, and it accounts for 6.3% of everyone living in Melanesia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Solomon Islands ranks 144th of 249 by area and 165th by population. That works out at 0.019% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.010% 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 Solomon Islands in the size ordering are Armenia at 29,743 km² and Albania at 28,748 km², against Solomon Islands's 28,896 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Solomon Islands averages 28 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 191st 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.

The Solomon Islands dollar (SBD) is used only in Solomon Islands among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Solomon Islands 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.

It uses the Solomon Islands dollar ($, SBD). It is issued for the Solomon Islands alone.

The top-level domain is .sb. Calls from overseas start with +677. In ISO terms it is sb in two letters and SLB in three.

Honiara is the city to remember for this country.

The Solomon Islands is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Zoom in from the world to Melanesia and Solomon Islands sits 3rd of 5 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Fiji just above and Vanuatu just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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.

• 🇫🇯 Fiji
• 🇻🇺 Vanuatu
• 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea