Country · Europe
Faroe Islands
Faroe Islands is a country in Northern Europe. Its capital city is Tórshavn. About 48 thousand people live there, in an area of 1 393 square kilometres.
Picture credit: bldskr (CC0) · PanWoyteczek (CC BY 4.0) · Joe deSousa (CC0) · Stig Nygaard (CC BY 2.0) · Zairon (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Faroe Islands?
Faroe Islands lies in Northern Europe, on the continent of Europe.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 6 902 km from the equator.
Its coastline is about 1 117 km long.
It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.
How big is Faroe Islands?
Faroe Islands covers 1 393 square kilometres.
Switzerland is about 30 times bigger.
Spread out evenly, that is roughly 34.8 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in Faroe Islands?
About 48 thousand people live in Faroe Islands.
People here speak Danish and Faroese.
They pay with the Danish krone (kr).
On average, people born here can expect to live about 78 years.
The land of Faroe Islands
Its coast runs for about 1 117 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 56 days.
It lies between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Faroe Islands different?
Websites from here often end in .fo.
Faroe Islands and the rest of the world
Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0 live in Faroe Islands.
It takes up about 0 % of all the land that countries stand on.
That is emptier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
A country, or a territory?
Faroe Islands 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, 1 live wild in Faroe Islands: Atlantic puffin.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
Questions children ask
What is the capital of Faroe Islands?
The capital of Faroe Islands is Tórshavn. It is the city where the country's government works from.
How many people live in Faroe Islands?
About 48 thousand people live in Faroe Islands. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big is Faroe Islands?
Faroe Islands covers 1 393 square kilometres. Switzerland is about 30 times bigger.
Which continent is Faroe Islands in?
Faroe Islands is in Europe, in the part called Northern Europe.
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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