🇵🇷 Puerto Rico

Where is Puerto Rico?

Puerto Rico lies in the Caribbean, on the continent of Americas.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 2 032 km from the equator.

Its coastline is about 501 km long.

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

How big is Puerto Rico?

Puerto Rico covers 8 870 square kilometres.

That is about 3.4 times the size of Luxembourg.

Spread everybody out evenly and you get about 360.2 people on every square kilometre.

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

Who lives in Puerto Rico?

About 3.2 million people live in Puerto Rico.

People here speak English and Spanish.

They pay with the United States dollar ($).

On average, people born here can expect to live about 76 years.

The land of Puerto Rico

The land of Puerto Rico sits on average 261 metres above sea level.

Its coast runs for about 501 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 25 days.

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

What makes Puerto Rico different?

Dishes the country is known for: Arroz con gandules and Mofongo.

Websites from here often end in .pr.

Puerto Rico and the rest of the world

Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about one lives in Puerto Rico.

It takes up about 0.01 % of all the land that countries stand on.

A country, or a territory?

Puerto Rico 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.