Country · Oceania
Cook Islands
The Cook Islands are a territory in Polynesia. About 17 000 people live there, in an area of 236 square kilometres. Their capital city is Avarua.
Picture credit: Nurg (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Robert Linsdell (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where are the Cook Islands?
The Cook Islands lie in Polynesia, on the continent of Oceania.
They sit in the southern half of the world, roughly 2 364 km from the equator.
Their coastline is about 120 km long.
They have no land neighbours — every border they have is with the sea.
How big are the Cook Islands?
The Cook Islands cover 236 square kilometres.
Luxembourg is about 11 times bigger.
Spread everybody out evenly and you get about 73.6 people on every square kilometre.
That is close to the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in the Cook Islands?
About 17 000 people live in the Cook Islands.
People here speak English and Cook Islands Māori.
They pay with the Cook Islands dollar and New Zealand dollar.
On average, people born here can expect to live about 71 years.
The land of the Cook Islands
Their coast runs for about 120 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 6 days.
They lie inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason their weather is the way it is.
What makes the Cook Islands different?
Websites from here often end in .ck.
The Cook Islands and the rest of the world
Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in the Cook Islands.
They take up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.
A country, or a territory?
The Cook 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.
Nature and animals
Of the animals on this site, one lives wild in the Cook Islands: Coconut crab.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
How big are the Cook Islands compared with the United States?
- The United States is about 39 714 times as big as the Cook Islands: 9 372 610 km² against 236 km².
- The United Kingdom is about 1 029 times as big as the Cook Islands: 242 900 km² against 236 km².
Questions children ask
What is the capital of the Cook Islands?
The capital of the Cook Islands is Avarua. It is the city where the government works from.
How many people live in the Cook Islands?
About 17 000 people live in the Cook Islands. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big are the Cook Islands?
The Cook Islands cover 236 square kilometres. Luxembourg is about 11 times bigger.
Which continent are the Cook Islands in?
The Cook Islands are in Oceania, in the part called Polynesia.
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.
Last checked: · How these pages are made