What do you think of this fact?
Which country has the most time zones? Most people guess Russia, some say the US. Both are just off. The record belongs to France.
One country, 12 clocks
Mainland France, the France with Paris in it, has just one time zone. But France also has numerous overseas territories scattered all over the planet. According to timeanddate.com, that brings the country to 12 time zones.
The list runs from French Polynesia in the Pacific, where clocks are ten hours behind universal time, to Wallis and Futuna, also in the Pacific but twelve hours ahead of it. In between are territories in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, French Guiana in South America and a strip of Antarctica. Many of these overseas territories are leftovers from colonial times and are still firmly part of France today.
For comparison: the UK gets by with exactly one time zone, Greenwich Mean Time in winter and British Summer Time in summer.
Sometimes even 13
It gets more complicated. The tiny archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off Canada switches to daylight saving time in summer. According to Guinness World Records, France then has 13 time zones.
Russia and the US have 11 each, according to Guinness.
Bonus fact: China is huge from east to west, but according to timeanddate.com, it officially has just one time zone.
For French people, that means: when it’s noon in Paris, it’s still the middle of the night in French Polynesia and almost the next day in Wallis and Futuna. Running a family group chat across overseas territories takes good timing.
So France isn’t just a country in Europe. It’s a country where it’s always breakfast time somewhere.