🇬🇸 South Georgia

Where is South Georgia?

South Georgia lies in Antarctic, on the continent of Antarctic.

It sits in the southern half of the world, roughly 6 067 km from the equator.

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

How big is South Georgia?

South Georgia covers 3 903 square kilometres.

Switzerland is about 11 times bigger.

Who lives in South Georgia?

People here speak English.

They pay with the Saint Helena pound (£).

The land of South Georgia

It lies between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes South Georgia different?

Websites from here often end in .gs.

South Georgia and the rest of the world

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

A country, or a territory?

South Georgia 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.