Country · Americas
Martinique
Martinique is a territory in the Caribbean. About 376 000 people live there, in an area of 1 128 square kilometres. Its capital city is Fort-de-France.
Picture credit: Hervé NICOLAS (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Radosław Botev (CC BY 3.0 pl) · Esam335 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Vlad Podvorny (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Martinique?
Martinique lies in the Caribbean, on the continent of Americas.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 1 633 km from the equator.
Its coastline is about 369 km long.
It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.
How big is Martinique?
Martinique covers 1 128 square kilometres.
Luxembourg is about 2.3 times bigger.
If everybody spread out evenly, there would be about 333.8 people on every square kilometre.
That is busier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.
Who lives in Martinique?
About 376 000 people live in Martinique.
People here speak French.
They pay with the Euro (€).
On average, people born here can expect to live about 78 years.
The land of Martinique
Its coast runs for about 369 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 18 days.
It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Martinique different?
Websites from here often end in .mq.
Martinique and the rest of the world
Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in Martinique.
It takes up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.
A country, or a territory?
Martinique 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
The highest mountain we cover here is Mount Pelée, at 1 397 metres.
How big is Martinique compared with the United States?
- The United States is about 8 309 times as big as Martinique: 9 372 610 km² against 1 128 km².
- The United Kingdom is about 215 times as big as Martinique: 242 900 km² against 1 128 km².
Questions children ask
What is the capital of Martinique?
The capital of Martinique is Fort-de-France. It is the city where the country's government works from.
How many people live in Martinique?
About 376 000 people live in Martinique. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big is Martinique?
Martinique covers 1 128 square kilometres. Luxembourg is about 2.3 times bigger.
Which continent is Martinique in?
Martinique 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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