United States Virgin Islands 🇻🇮

The United States Virgin Islands belongs to the Caribbean, and it is a dependent territory rather than a country in the political sense. The long form of the name is Virgin Islands of the United States. Charlotte Amalie is the capital.

Around 104,377 people live there, placing it 198th of 250 by population — between Aruba above it and Tonga below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 17th by area and 15th by population.

By land area it covers 347 km², which ranks it 212th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Mayotte and just ahead of Grenada. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is a little larger than Malta.

United States Virgin Islands 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. United States Virgin Islands 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+1340
• Its own internet domain.vi
• Its own ISO codesvi / VIR
• A designated capitalCharlotte Amalie

The coordinates the dataset gives are 18.4° N, 64.9° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,043 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 250 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

United States Virgin 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 British Virgin Islands, roughly 35 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 United States Virgin Islands's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Spread across 347 km², that works out at about 301 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

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

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

Inside the Americas it places 38th of 56 by population, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

United States Virgin Islands does not have the United States dollar to itself. It is one of 20 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, United States Virgin 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.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and United States Virgin Islands sits 15th of 28 by population and 17th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Aruba just above and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 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.

• 🇦🇼 Aruba
• 🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

It uses the United States dollar ($, USD). That is a shared currency: 19 other entries use it, including American Samoa, the Bahamas, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands and Cambodia.

The top-level domain is .vi. To phone it from abroad you dial +1340. In ISO terms it is vi in two letters and VIR in three.

Charlotte Amalie is the city to remember for this territory.

The United States Virgin Islands is not a UN member state. Its official name points to the United States as the administering state. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.