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 Book Bush Was Reading on 9/11
I’m often asked why I have this book. Well, this book is a piece of American History. It is the book that George W. Bush was reading when 9⁄11 happened. That morning, he was at M. E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, following along as studen…
What types of jet we sell?
What kind of aircraft are we selling? First of all, there’s three groups of aviation: there is the commercial airlines, there’s the military, and then there’s general aviation. General aviation is broken down into a lot of different things: it’s agricultu…
pH and pKa relationship for buffers | Chemistry | Khan Academy
We’re going to talk about the relationship between pH and pKa and buffers. Specifically, we’re going to be talking mostly about this in terms of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation. But before we go to the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation, which I’m going to…
Howard Marks: 50 Years of Investing Wisdom in 50 Minutes (Priceless Lecture)
Well, Cain said it best of anybody. He said, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” MH and some… so somebody who bets that a market which is irrational is going to… a market is too high, we say that’s irrational. Somebody who …
Phototropism | Plant Biology | Khan Academy
You’ve probably seen plants either in your house or, if you go for a walk, you’ve seen parts of the plants twist and turn in all sorts of directions. If you observe closely, you’ll see that oftentimes it looks like the plant is twisting or turning towards…
Estimating adding and subtracting 3 digit numbers
[Instructor] What we’re going to do in this video is get some practice estimating adding and subtracting three digit numbers. And so here it says 398 plus 251 is, and this squiggly equal sign means we just need to make an estimate. We wanna know what is…