Scandinavia Map

Denmark, Norway and Sweden make up Scandinavia in the strict sense, and they are the three countries colored on this map. Norway and Sweden share the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Denmark belongs to the group by history and language, since Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are closely related. Finland and Iceland are Nordic countries, and English usage sometimes counts them as Scandinavian too. On this map Finland is gray and Iceland is outside the frame. Both are colored on the Nordic countries map. Denmark here means Denmark proper, so the colored shape leaves out its two self-governing territories, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Scandinavia does not include Greenland, a Nordic territory.

Scandinavia is in northern Europe. Denmark lies farthest south, on the Jutland peninsula and its islands between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. To its north, Norway and Sweden take up most of the Scandinavian Peninsula, which reaches north of the Arctic Circle. The Skagerrak strait lies between Denmark and Norway, and the Øresund strait separates Denmark's Zealand, with Copenhagen, from Sweden's Scania, with Malmö. The Øresund narrows to 4 km between Helsingør and Helsingborg. On land, Scandinavia's only outside neighbors are Finland and Russia in the north and Germany in the south. The Europe map shows the three with those neighbors and the rest of the continent.

Not in the narrow, three-country sense: Finland is a Nordic country but not a Scandinavian one, and this map draws it in gray to the east of Sweden and Norway. Finland was part of the Swedish realm until 1809, and Swedish is one of its two national languages. Its northwest lies on the Scandinavian Peninsula too. Finnish, though, is a Uralic language, unrelated to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Finland does belong to Fennoscandia, a geographic term for the Scandinavian Peninsula, Finland, Karelia and the Kola Peninsula.

Nordic is the wider term and Scandinavian the narrower one. In the strict sense this map uses, the Scandinavian countries are Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The Nordic countries are those three plus Finland and Iceland, and the Nordic region also takes in the Faroe Islands and Greenland, which belong to the Kingdom of Denmark, and Åland, which belongs to Finland. All of them work together in the Nordic Council, founded in 1952. Estonia, across the Baltic Sea, is neither Scandinavian nor a member of the Nordic Council. For all five countries, use the Nordic countries map.

Iceland is not part of Scandinavia proper, which is Denmark, Norway and Sweden, though it is one of the five Nordic countries. Its ties to Scandinavia include language and settlement: Icelandic is a North Germanic language like Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, and Iceland was settled mainly from Norway. The island came under the Norwegian crown between 1262 and 1264 and later under the Danish crown, and it became a republic on 17 June 1944. It lies in the North Atlantic west of Norway, outside this map's frame.

Yes, Denmark is one of the three Scandinavian countries, colored here with Norway and Sweden, although none of it lies on the Scandinavian Peninsula. The peninsula holds Norway, Sweden and part of northwestern Finland. Denmark consists of the northern part of the Jutland peninsula, which it shares with Germany, and islands such as Zealand, Funen and Bornholm. Norway was ruled from Copenhagen until 1814, when Denmark gave it up under the Treaty of Kiel. The purely geographic grouping, Fennoscandia, takes in Finland but leaves Denmark out.

Scandinavia had 22,216,659 people in 2025, by the World Bank's estimates for Denmark, Norway and Sweden added together. Sweden alone had 10,596,620, close to half of the total. Denmark, the smallest of the three countries by land, had 6,009,169 people, more than Norway's 5,610,870. The three together gained about 1.5 million people from 20,671,276 in 2015, and Sweden accounted for 797,434 of that growth. The World Bank counts the Faroe Islands and Greenland separately, so Denmark's figure does not include them.

Three rows of data are enough for a custom map of Scandinavia in the free Ultimaps editor, and you can start without an account. List the three countries by English name or ISO code, such as SWE, beside your figures, then paste or import the table. To color by hand, click each country with the Paint tool. Places outside the 13 marked cities, such as Uppsala or Stavanger, go in as pins, and any other text as labels. A free account lets you save, publish, share and embed the map. Downloading without Pro gives you a standard PNG with a small Ultimaps credit. With Ultimaps Pro, the same map is also available as high-resolution PNG, SVG and PDF.