yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Countries inside Countries


2m read
·Nov 7, 2024

When it comes to neighbors, most countries have several options: like North to Canada or South to Mexico. But there are countries that don't have this freedom of choice, not because they're islands but because they're trapped in another country. For example: tiny Vatican City, which fits inside of not just Italy, but also just Rome.

How Vatican City got surrounded is complicated, but not unique for there is also the Republic of San Marino, home to 30,000 citizens which Italy also completely surrounds. Italy, apparently, is a country that likes countries in its country. But trapping nations is not just Italy's thing for there's also Lesotho, in South Africa which is both the largest encircled country at 70 times Vatican City's size and the most populated with over 2,000,000 citizens.

The thing that makes these three countries' borders bizarre is that any path in or out must go through the one and only neighbor they have. But now take a look at The Gambia, which excluding that tiny ocean border, is as surrounded as any nation can get. If we amend the previous rule to every land route, now we've made a category of single-neighbored nations.

Which includes all four of these and countries like Portugal, where the only way in or out is through Spain. Who else is on this list? Well, there's Monaco which must go through France, Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Denmark through Germany, South Korea through North Korea (though South Korea might as well be an island nation for most practical travel purposes), East Timor and Papua New Guinea both through Indonesia, Brunei through Malaysia.

And there are two sets of twins: there is The Dominican Republic whose only neighbor is Haiti and Haiti, whose only neighbor is The Dominican Republic. And the second set is: Ireland through the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom through Ireland.

A side note here: While there are tons of 'British' places around the world, some of which border other nations -- these are not part of the United Kingdom. It's complicated. Though if you wanted to, you could argue that the United Kingdom technically dug a land border under the channel to the continent, presumably to be closer to France, her best friend ever.

Finally, there's one more country in this category: Canada: the largest single-neighbored nation in the world.

More Articles

View All
The Probability of Human Existence Is Infinitesimally Small
Here’s another way to think about it that is mathematically frightening for the people who think that the aliens are out there and they’re going to visit us at some time in the future. We were talking earlier about trillions of planets that exist througho…
Curvature of a helix, part 2
So where we left off, we were looking at this parametric function for a three-dimensional curve and what it draws. I showed you was a helix in three-dimensional space, and we’re trying to find its curvature. The way you think about that is you have a circ…
Dilating a triangle example
We are asked to draw the image of triangle ABC under a dilation whose center is P and scale factor is one fourth. So pause this video and at least think about how you would do this. You don’t have access to the tool that I do, where I can move this around…
Multiplying and dividing decimals by 10
We’ve already learned that when we multiply by ten, let’s say we took the number 53 and we were to multiply it by ten, it has the effect of shifting all the digits one place to the left. So this should be a review for you, but this was going to be 530. We…
Background of the Carthaginians | World History | Khan Academy
Gustin’s previous videos discuss how Rome became a republic in 509 BCE, but it’s worth noting—and I’ve done this in other videos—that at that point, Rome was not this vast empire; it was really just in control of Rome itself. But over the next few hundred…
What Women in China Want | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Foreign. I’ve traveled to China scores of times. I know every way of getting in, but this I really was stuck. In the summer of 2022, Justin Jin started a project that would become a National Geographic cover story. Justin is a photographer based in Brusse…