🇦🇽 Åland Islands

Where are the Åland Islands?

The Åland Islands lie in Northern Europe, on the continent of Europe.

They sit in the northern half of the world, roughly 6 692 km from the equator.

They have no land neighbours — every border they have is with the sea.

How big are the Åland Islands?

The Åland Islands cover 1 580 square kilometres.

Switzerland is about 26 times bigger.

Who lives in the Åland Islands?

People here speak Swedish.

They pay with the Euro (€).

The land of the Åland Islands

They lie between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason their weather is the way it is.

What makes the Åland Islands different?

Websites from here often end in .ax.

The Åland Islands and the rest of the world

They take up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.

A country, or a territory?

The Åland Islands are not an independent country but a territory. They have their own name, their own borders and often their own laws, but another country speaks for them abroad — they hold no seat of their own at the United Nations, for instance.

That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.

On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.