Country · Americas
Curaçao
Country of Curaçao
Curaçao is a territory in the Caribbean. It covers 444 square kilometres. Its capital city is Willemstad.
Picture credit: Martin Falbisoner (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Charles Hoffman (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Margo Groenewoud (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Coolcaesar (CC BY 4.0) · Martin Falbisoner (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Curaçao?
Curaçao lies in the Caribbean, on the continent of Americas.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 1 349 km from the equator.
It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.
How big is Curaçao?
Curaçao covers 444 square kilometres.
Luxembourg is about 5.8 times bigger.
Who lives in Curaçao?
People here speak English, Dutch and Papiamento.
They pay with the Netherlands Antillean guilder (ƒ).
The land of Curaçao
It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Curaçao different?
Websites from here often end in .cw.
Curaçao 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?
Curaçao 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 Curaçao: Giant centipede.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
How big is Curaçao compared with the United States?
- The United States is about 21 109 times as big as Curaçao: 9 372 610 km² against 444 km².
- The United Kingdom is about 547 times as big as Curaçao: 242 900 km² against 444 km².
Questions children ask
What is the capital of Curaçao?
The capital of Curaçao is Willemstad. It is the city where the country's government works from.
How big is Curaçao?
Curaçao covers 444 square kilometres. Luxembourg is about 5.8 times bigger.
Which continent is Curaçao in?
Curaçao 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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