Countries with the most islands in the world

Ask which country has the most islands and most people point to the tropics, to Indonesia or the Philippines. Wrong. The clear leader is Sweden, a country almost nobody links with islands. The reason lies in the ice age and in the question of when a rock in the water counts as an island at all.

Sweden: over a quarter of a million islands

Sweden reaches around 267,570 islands and tops the world ranking. The catch: only about 984 of them are inhabited, less than half a percent. The great majority are tiny rocks, known as skerries, that barely rise out of the water.

These skerries are a legacy of the ice age. Over thousands of years glaciers ground down the rock and left behind a jagged coast full of little humps as they retreated. The Stockholm archipelago alone is made up of thousands of islands, skerries and bare rocks.

Norway and Finland: the rest of the north

Right behind Sweden come the Nordic neighbours. Norway counts around 239,000 islands along its heavily frayed fjord coast, and here too only a fraction are inhabited. Finland reaches around 179,000, with a twist: many of them lie not by the sea but in the country's countless inland lakes.

All three owe their flood of islands to the same process. The Scandinavian landmass was effectively planed down by the ice sheets of the last ice age. What remained is one of the most island rich regions on Earth, even though nobody here pictures palm trees.

Canada: islands to the horizon

Outside Scandinavia, Canada is the big name. The country counts around 52,455 islands, among them giants like Baffin Island in the Arctic north, but also an endless scatter of small ones in Georgian Bay and the lakes of the Canadian Shield. Here too the ice age did the groundwork thoroughly.

The countries with the most islands

By the number of islands, the top of the list looks like this:

• Sweden: around 267,570 islands, only about 984 of them inhabited.
• Norway: around 239,000 islands along the fjord coast.
• Finland: around 179,000 islands, many of them in inland lakes.
• Canada: around 52,455 islands, from the Arctic to the lakes.
• Indonesia: officially around 17,500 islands, the largest archipelago on Earth.
• Philippines: around 7,641 islands, roughly 2,000 of them inhabited.

Why the counting decides everything

Indonesia and the Philippines are the classic island nations, and yet they sit further down this list. That is not because they have less coastline, but because of how you count. Their islands are on average larger, tropical and inhabited, while Sweden counts every bare rock that still pokes out at high water.

That is exactly why such rankings should be taken with a pinch of salt. There is no single worldwide definition of how big a piece of land has to be to count as an island. Indonesia, for instance, officially lists around 17,500 islands, while a satellite survey in 2021 arrived at a noticeably lower figure. Count strictly and you land at a few thousand, include every skerry and you reach hundreds of thousands.

In a quiz you can often spot island nations by their ragged shape. In CountryRush you meet Indonesia, the Philippines and many more, and the Daily Trip makes sure the small island countries do not slip through either.