The United Kingdom has 14 Overseas Territories (OTs) around the world. These include places like Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and the Cayman Islands. Some are small islands, and others are larger areas, but they are all linked to the UK.
All these territories, along with the Crown Dependencies, share the same monarch, King Charles III.
One of these territories is Saint Helena. It’s a small, tropical island made from volcanic rock, located in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the most remote islands in the world and had no people living on it when Portuguese sailors found it in the early 1500s on their way to India.
Saint Helena is about 1,600 miles away from Africa, with Angola and Namibia as the nearest countries. It’s also about 4,900 miles from the UK.
The island is about 10 miles long and 5 miles wide. As of 2021, about 4,400 people live there. The land is rough and hilly because of old volcanic activity—the last eruptions happened about 7 million years ago. The highest point is called Diana’s Peak, which is 818 meters tall. The coastline has patches of plants, and a lot of the land is covered with New Zealand flax, a plant once used for industry.
There are no animals that originally came from the island, but people have brought in animals like cows, cats, dogs, goats, and rabbits. The national bird is the Saint Helena plover, also called the wirebird because of its thin legs. It is shown on the island’s flag and coat of arms.
The island is named after Saint Helena, the mother of Roman Emperor Constantine I, the first emperor to become a Christian.
After it was found in 1502, Saint Helena was an important stop for ships sailing between Europe and Asia for about 400 years, before the Suez Canal was built.
Saint Helena is the UK’s second-oldest Overseas Territory, after Bermuda. It became a British colony in 1834. In 1966, it got some self-government, and a new constitution in 1989 gave local people more power to vote and reduced the power of the governor. Another constitution was introduced in 2009, which included a bill of rights.
Before the airport opened in 2017, the only way to get there was by boat, with a six-day journey on the RMS St Helena.
The island is most famous as the place where Napoleon Bonaparte was sent after losing the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He died there in 1821.
Slavery was banned on the island in 1792. In 1818, children born to slaves were set free. In 1827, all the remaining slaves on the island were freed, six years before Britain officially ended slavery in its colonies.
In 1899, an undersea cable was laid to connect Saint Helena to London, allowing telegram messages to be sent.
Saint Helena is also home to Jonathan, a 191-year-old tortoise. He is the oldest known living land animal in the world. Earlier this year, Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, visited him.