How Small Is St Helena?

Stand by to be surprised

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm? And well you should not!
Yoda in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’

Most people cannot grasp how small St Helena actually is

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Location Map St Helena

Location map

Below: 122Km² By comparison Read More

122Km²

We can explain that St Helena is 16 by 8 kilometres, or 121 km², but can you visualise that? Most people can’t so the image below will help.

To see just how small St Helena is, right-click on the image below and use ‘save link as’ [NB: NOT ‘save image as’] to download it to your system (8.9Mb). Now load the image into your preferred image-viewer and, where indicated zoom in…and in…and in…☺

By comparison

The table below compares St Helena’s size to other ‘small’ places:

Place	Area, Km²	Number of St Helenas
Cuba	`109,884`	908
Switzerland	`41,285`	341
Rhode Island{1}	`4,002`	33
Greater London	`1,572`	13
New York City	`790`	6.5
Tonga	`748`	6.2
Isle of Man	`572`	4.7
Andorra	`468`	3.9
Isle of Wight	`384`	3.2
Elba{2}	`224`	1.9
Liechtenstein	`160`	1.3
St Helena	`122`	1.0
Tristan da Cunha	`98`	0.8
Ascension Island	`88`	0.7
Bermuda	`53`	0.4
Tuvalu	`26`	0.2

The largest country in the world by land area is Russia, 17,098,242km². St Helena would fit into Russia 140,149 (and ½!) times.

Article: A Tiny Dot

Extract from a report by visitors published in the St Helena Herald 27th February 2009{3}

After 2 weeks at sea we had arrived on St Helena. It’s such a tiny dot in such an enormous ocean, that it seemed nothing short of a miracle that we found it at all! As we approached, its volcanic mountainous slopes, rising sheer out of the water, looked too forbidding and inhospitable to be able to support anything much, let alone a population of around 3,500 people.

But when we landed we found a wonderfully diverse and friendly place and in the space of only 10 miles diameter you can travel (slowly-you don’t get above 3rd gear) from semi-arid desert to high peaks bathed in cloud and covered in lush green vegetation. So that if you don’t look too closely and realise that you could hardly name a single tree, you might be somewhere in the Alps - if not a tropical rainforest, or even on the moon. We drove up the scary, winding roads to the local community hall - just like us at home except for the fabulously starlit sky, and the serenade of frogs that greeted us.

And then there’s the little patch of France that is forever Napoleon, but that’s another story…

Sis tranquillus, est iocum

Footnotes:
{1} The smallest State of America.{2} Where Napoleon was first exiled, in May 1814. He escaped, caused more trouble, lost the Battle of Waterloo and ended up on St Helena.{3} Reproduced for educational non-commercial use only; all copyrights are acknowledged.

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