🇬🇺 Guam

Where is Guam?

Guam lies in Micronesia, on the continent of Oceania.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 1 499 km from the equator.

Its coastline is about 126 km long.

It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.

How big is Guam?

Guam covers 549 square kilometres.

Luxembourg is about 4.7 times bigger.

Spread everybody out evenly and you get about 301.9 people on every square kilometre.

That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.

Who lives in Guam?

About 166 thousand people live in Guam.

People here speak Chamorro, English and Spanish.

They pay with the United States dollar ($).

On average, people born here can expect to live about 78 years.

The land of Guam

Its coast runs for about 126 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 6 days.

It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes Guam different?

Websites from here often end in .gu.

Guam and the rest of the world

Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in Guam.

It takes up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.

A country, or a territory?

Guam is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its 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.