Country · Americas
Falkland Islands
The Falkland Islands are a territory in South America. About 2 840 people live there, in an area of 12 173 square kilometres. Their capital city is Stanley.
Where are the Falkland Islands?
The Falkland Islands lie in South America, on the continent of Americas.
They sit in the southern half of the world, roughly 5 761 km from the equator.
Their coastline is about 1 288 km long.
They have no land neighbours — every border they have is with the sea.
How big are the Falkland Islands?
The Falkland Islands cover 12 173 square kilometres.
That is about 4.7 times the size of Luxembourg.
Spread everybody out evenly and you get about 0.2 people on every square kilometre.
That is emptier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in the Falkland Islands?
About 2 840 people live in the Falkland Islands.
People here speak English.
They pay with the Falkland Islands pound (£).
The land of the Falkland Islands
Their coast runs for about 1 288 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 64 days.
They lie between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason their weather is the way it is.
What makes the Falkland Islands different?
Websites from here often end in .fk.
The Falkland Islands and the rest of the world
Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in the Falkland Islands.
They take up about 0.01 % of all the land that countries stand on.
A country, or a territory?
The Falkland 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.
Questions children ask
What is the capital of the Falkland Islands?
The capital of the Falkland Islands is Stanley. It is the city where the government works from.
How many people live in the Falkland Islands?
About 2 840 people live in the Falkland Islands. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big are the Falkland Islands?
The Falkland Islands cover 12 173 square kilometres. That is about 4.7 times the size of Luxembourg.
Which continent are the Falkland Islands in?
The Falkland Islands are in Americas, in the part called South America.
Where these numbers come from
Borders and outlines: Natural Earth. Names, capitals, areas, languages and currencies: ISO 3166 data (world-countries). Population: World Bank, 2018. Every derived figure on this page (ranks, density, distance from the equator) is calculated from those values.
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