Country · Americas
Aruba
Aruba is a territory in the Caribbean. About 106 000 people live there, in an area of 180 square kilometres. Its capital city is Oranjestad.
Picture credit: James Martins (CC BY 3.0) · Ginelly.Q (CC BY 4.0) · EgorovaSvetlana (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Bgabel (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Martin Falbisoner (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Aruba?
Aruba lies in the Caribbean, on the continent of Americas.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 1 392 km from the equator.
Its coastline is about 69 km long.
It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.
How big is Aruba?
Aruba covers 180 square kilometres.
Luxembourg is about 14 times bigger.
If everybody spread out evenly, there would be about 588 people on every square kilometre.
That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in Aruba?
About 106 000 people live in Aruba.
People here speak Dutch and Papiamento.
They pay with the Aruban florin (ƒ).
On average, people born here can expect to live about 78 years.
The land of Aruba
Its coast runs for about 69 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 3 days.
It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Aruba different?
A dish the country is known for: Keshi yena.
Websites from here often end in .aw.
Aruba and the rest of the world
Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in Aruba.
It takes up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.
A country, or a territory?
Aruba 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.
Nature and animals
Of the animals on this site, one lives wild in Aruba: Giant centipede.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
How big is Aruba compared with the United States?
- The United States is about 52 070 times as big as Aruba: 9 372 610 km² against 180 km².
- The United Kingdom is about 1 349 times as big as Aruba: 242 900 km² against 180 km².
Questions children ask
What is the capital of Aruba?
The capital of Aruba is Oranjestad. It is the city where the country's government works from.
How many people live in Aruba?
About 106 000 people live in Aruba. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big is Aruba?
Aruba covers 180 square kilometres. Luxembourg is about 14 times bigger.
Which continent is Aruba in?
Aruba is in Americas, in the part called the Caribbean.
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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