Country · Europe
Faroe Islands
The Faroe Islands are a territory in Northern Europe. About 48 000 people live there, in an area of 1 393 square kilometres. Their capital city is Tórshavn.
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 are the Faroe Islands?
The Faroe Islands lie in Northern Europe, on the continent of Europe.
They sit in the northern half of the world, roughly 6 902 km from the equator.
Their coastline is about 1 117 km long.
They have no land neighbours — every border they have is with the sea.
How big are the Faroe Islands?
The Faroe Islands cover 1 393 square kilometres.
Switzerland is about 30 times bigger.
Spread everybody out evenly and you get about 34.8 people on every square kilometre.
That is emptier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in the Faroe Islands?
About 48 000 people live in the Faroe Islands.
People here speak Danish and Faroese.
They pay with the Danish krone and Faroese króna.
On average, people born here can expect to live about 78 years.
The land of the Faroe Islands
Their coast runs for about 1 117 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 56 days.
They lie between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason their weather is the way it is.
What makes the Faroe Islands different?
Websites from here often end in .fo.
The Faroe Islands and the rest of the world
Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in the Faroe 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 Faroe 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 Faroe Islands: Atlantic puffin.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
How big are the Faroe Islands compared with the United States?
- The United States is about 6 728 times as big as the Faroe Islands: 9 372 610 km² against 1 393 km².
- The United Kingdom is about 174 times as big as the Faroe Islands: 242 900 km² against 1 393 km².
Questions children ask
What is the capital of the Faroe Islands?
The capital of the Faroe Islands is Tórshavn. It is the city where the government works from.
How many people live in the Faroe Islands?
About 48 000 people live in the Faroe Islands. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big are the Faroe Islands?
The Faroe Islands cover 1 393 square kilometres. Switzerland is about 30 times bigger.
Which continent are the Faroe Islands in?
The Faroe Islands are 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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