Pieces of countries marooned inside other countries, a village inside an enclave inside a country, borders that meet in threes and almost in fours, an island that changes hands every six months and a patch of desert nobody wants. Every one I could find in Wikipedia's lists, measured against Natural Earth's map of the world.
An enclave is a piece of one country surrounded on every side by another. There are more of them than you might think, and they are stranger than you might expect. In the Dutch town of Baarle, 22 fragments of Belgium are scattered through the streets, and 8 fragments of the Netherlands sit inside those or inside Belgium proper. Until 2015 there was a patch of India, inside a patch of Bangladesh, inside a patch of India, inside Bangladesh. And on a river between France and Spain there is an island that is French for half the year and Spanish for the other half.
This page maps them all: every national-level enclave, exclave, semi-enclave, pene-exclave, divided island, condominium and piece of unclaimed land in Wikipedia's lists, 107 places in all, with every tripoint I could compute from Natural Earth's map of the world's borders. Take the tour of 15 of the strangest, or explore on your own. Further down: who owns the most enclaves, how small they get, where three countries meet, and which countries have the most neighbours.
Circles: places in Wikipedia's national-level lists of enclaves and exclaves, coloured by type, at the coordinates the list or the place's own article gives, or at the Natural Earth part that is the place. 51 pene-exclaves, 17 divided islands and 1 semi-exclave have no position in the sources and are not drawn. Triangles: tripoints computed from Natural Earth 1:10m boundaries. Shaded shapes (Map layers): the 50 detached parts of countries that touch another country in Natural Earth. Borders are Natural Earth's de facto lines, which are not an endorsement of any claim. Map labels: OpenFreeMap, © OpenMapTiles, © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hillshade: Esri.
Wikipedia's List of enclaves and exclaves is the most complete public catalogue. At the level of whole countries it lists 42 true enclaves: pieces of one country that are entirely surrounded by one other country. Some are single villages, some are clusters (Baarle-Hertog counts as one entry with 22 parcels), so together they come to 85 separate pieces. They belong to 24 countries and sit inside 24. 10 are islands, lagoons or reefs in someone else's waters, such as Malawi's Likoma and Chizumulu islands in the Mozambican part of Lake Malawi; the other 32 are on dry land.
Who owns the world's true enclaves
National-level entries in Wikipedia's list of enclaves that are also exclaves, by the country that owns them. Bars: entries (dark: on land; light: islands and water). Labels: separate pieces. Hover a bar.
Germany owns the most entries, 6: Büsingen on the Rhine, and 5 scraps of farmland and forest cut off when the Treaty of Versailles gave Belgium the trackbed of the Vennbahn railway, which runs through German land. Belgium owns the most pieces, 22, all of them in Baarle. Kyrgyzstan surrounds the largest on dry land: Uzbekistan's Sokh (234 km²), Tajikistan's Vorukh (96.7 km²) and Uzbekistan's Shakhimardan. Armenia and Azerbaijan each hold enclaves inside the other, most of them controlled by the other side since the war of the early 1990s.
Beyond these, the list counts 3 whole countries that are enclaves (Lesotho inside South Africa, and San Marino and the Vatican inside Italy), 4 exclaves that are not enclaves because they touch more than one country or the sea (Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan, 5,500 km², is the largest), 17 semi-enclaves and semi-exclaves with a coast (Kaliningrad, Cabinda, Alaska), 62 pene-exclaves that you can only reach by road through another country, and 36 divided islands. It also lists 16 pockets of high seas surrounded by countries' exclusive economic zones, which I leave out because they are water, and 214 enclaves of provinces, counties and towns, which I count but do not map.
From a front garden to a kingdom
Area of every enclave and exclave with an area in the sources, log scale: Baarle's parcels, the former India and Bangladesh enclaves, today's true enclaves, the three enclaved countries and the exclaves that are not enclaves. Hover a dot.
The range is enormous. The smallest entry in the list is Germany's Rückschlag, 16,000 square metres, a house and its garden on the wrong side of the Vennbahn. The smallest single parcel is Baarle's H7, 2,469 square metres. At the other end, Lesotho (30,355 km²) is more than ten million times the size of H7. Among the enclaves that are not countries, Sokh is the largest on land and Argentina's Apipé islands in the Paraná (320 km²) the largest in water.
Every true international enclave
The 42 national-level entries, with Wikipedia's areas. "In NE" marks the 17 that Natural Earth's 1:10m map draws as a separate piece. Click a row to see it on the map.
Baarle. The border between Baarle-Hertog in Belgium and Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands is the result of medieval land deals between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant, written down in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1843. Wikipedia's parcel tables list 22 Belgian exclaves inside the Netherlands, the largest (H1) 153.6 hectares and the smallest (H7) 2,469 square metres, and 8 Dutch parcels: seven counter-enclaves inside the Belgian ones and an eighth inside Belgium proper. The tables have the line running through about 54 homes, as well as shops, sheds, a warehouse and a liquor store's loading dock. In H7 it runs through the middle of a front door, which has one Belgian and one Dutch house number. The border is marked on the streets with iron pins, and restaurants that sat across it once moved their customers to the Belgian tables when Dutch closing time came.
Cooch Behar. Along the border of India and Bangladesh there was something far stranger. Wikipedia's article counts 102 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh, containing 21 Bangladeshi counter-enclaves, and 71 Bangladeshi enclaves inside India, containing 3 Indian counter-enclaves. Inside one of those counter-enclaves lay Dahala Khagrabari, a piece of India of 6,880 square metres: India, inside Bangladesh, inside India, inside Bangladesh, the only third-order enclave in the world. Legend says the enclaves were stakes in card or chess games between two local rulers; the records point to a confused treaty of 1713. A joint census in 2010 found 51,549 people living in them. At midnight on 31 July 2015 the two countries swapped: Bangladesh received 111 Indian enclaves and India 51 Bangladeshi ones. Only Dahagram-Angarpota (25.95 km²) remains, joined to Bangladesh by the Tin Bigha Corridor, a strip of Indian land 178 by 85 m that Bangladesh may use.
Until 2015, a farmer in Dahala Khagrabari lived in India, inside Bangladesh, inside India, inside Bangladesh.
Madha and Nahwa. The only nested pair left at country level is in the mountains of the Arabian peninsula. Madha, a piece of Oman of about 75 km², sits inside the United Arab Emirates, and inside Madha sits Nahwa, a village of about 40 buildings that belongs to the emirate of Sharjah. The villagers chose their rulers in the 1930s or 1940s, and the lines were settled in 1969. Natural Earth draws both.
Natural Earth's countries share their border points exactly, so every place where three countries meet can be found by machine: a point on the boundary of three countries. I find 167 such tripoints, one point where four meet, and 14 more where two countries meet an indeterminate zone such as the Siachen Glacier or the Cyprus buffer zone. Wikipedia's article on tripoints counted 181 in 2020, and its list has 176 rows, which include de facto states such as Abkhazia that Natural Earth does not separate.
The countries with the most tripoints
Tripoints on each country's border in Natural Earth (bars; the quadripoint counts once), and in Wikipedia's list of tripoints (ticks). Hover a bar.
China has the most, 15 (Wikipedia's list has 16), then Russia with 10 (Wikipedia: 13). Austria, landlocked and with 8 neighbours, has 9, as does DR Congo. The 26 countries with land neighbours but no tripoint include Portugal, Canada and the United States, whose neighbours do not touch each other.
The one point in Natural Earth where four countries meet is at Kazungula on the Zambezi, where Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe come together. It is a quadripoint only on the map. Wikipedia's articles say that all four states agreed in the late 2000s that Botswana and Zambia share a border of about 150 m, so there are two tripoints about 100 to 150 m apart. The Kazungula Bridge has crossed that short border since May 2021. At 1:10 million, 150 m is too short to draw. Austria's Jungholz shows the opposite case: it touches the rest of Austria at a single point, the summit of the Sorgschrofen, where two Austrian and two German municipalities meet, and every road in comes through Germany.
The countries with the most neighbours
Countries sharing a land border, in Natural Earth (bars, with total land border length), and in Wikipedia's table of land borders (ticks). Dependencies count with their sovereign. Hover a bar.
Counting countries the way Natural Earth draws them, with dependencies such as Hong Kong or French Guiana counted with the country that holds them, China and Russia each touch 14 others. France comes third with 11, thanks to French Guiana (Brazil and Suriname) and Saint-Martin (the Netherlands' Sint Maarten), then Brazil with 10. Of the 160 countries in both sources, Natural Earth and Wikipedia agree on the number of neighbours for 150. Most of the 10 differences are oddities themselves. The 150 m border between Botswana and Zambia and the little island on the causeway between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are too small for the map. Canada gained Denmark as a neighbour when they split Hans Island in 2022, which Natural Earth does not show. Natural Earth's de facto line in Kashmir takes away the border between Afghanistan and India, and its separate Somaliland gives Ethiopia an extra neighbour. And counting dependencies with their sovereign gives the United Kingdom neighbours through Gibraltar and its bases on Cyprus, and the Netherlands one through Sint Maarten.
On Natural Earth's lines the longest border between two countries is Canada and the United States, 7,936 km, then Kazakhstan and Russia, 6,658 km. Russia's land borders add up to 19,013 km and China's to 18,995 km, shorter than the 20,017 km and 22,147 km in Wikipedia's table, because a map at 1:10 million smooths out the wiggles. The same smoothing shrinks the Vatican's border with Italy to 430 m.
18 countries have exactly one neighbour on Natural Earth's map: Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Ireland, Lesotho, Monaco, Northern Cyprus, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Qatar, San Marino, South Korea, The Gambia, Timor-Leste, Vatican City. Three of them, Lesotho, San Marino and the Vatican, have no coast either: they are the world's enclaved countries.
Landlocked, twice. 45 countries in Natural Earth have no sea coast, if the Caspian Sea, which the map draws as 397,054 km² of water enclosed by land, counts as a lake. That is Wikipedia's 44 plus Kosovo. Two are doubly landlocked: every neighbour is landlocked too, so reaching the sea means crossing at least two borders. Liechtenstein's neighbours are Austria and Switzerland; Uzbekistan's are Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Uzbekistan's status depends on the Caspian: treat it as a sea, and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have coasts.
A condominium is territory that two or more countries rule together. Wikipedia's table lists 15, from Antarctica to stretches of rivers and lakes. The smallest and oldest is Pheasant Island in the Bidasoa between France and Spain, 6,820 square metres, shared since the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659. France runs it from 1 August to 31 January and Spain from 1 February to 31 July. Louis XIV met his future wife there. There are no pheasants.
Condominiums
Wikipedia's table of current condominiums. Click a mapped row to see it on the map.
Bir Tawil is the opposite: 2,060 km² of desert between Egypt and Sudan that neither country claims. Two British lines disagree. The straight political boundary of 1899 follows the 22nd parallel; the irregular administrative boundary of 1902 does not. Egypt claims the first and Sudan the second, because each gives it the much larger Halaib Triangle on the Red Sea, which leaves Bir Tawil to nobody. Natural Earth draws it as an indeterminate zone, which this page does not count as a country. On the Danube, four pockets of land on the western bank, the largest Gornja Siga, are claimed by neither Croatia nor Serbia.
Some islands are simply split. Märket, a 3.3 hectare skerry in the Baltic, has been divided between Sweden and Finland since 1809. Finland built a lighthouse on it in 1885, on the highest point, which turned out to be on the Swedish half; in 1985 the line was redrawn as an inverted S, about 480 m long, that puts the lighthouse in Finland with no net change of territory. Hans Island, a barren rock between Canada and Greenland that the two countries argued over for years in the so-called Whisky War, was split on 14 June 2022 by a 1,280 m border.
Natural Earth is the standard free map of the world's countries. At its most detailed scale, 1:10 million, a millimetre on the map is 10 km on the ground, so many oddities are too small for it. Of Wikipedia's 42 true enclaves, only 17 appear as a separate piece in Natural Earth; Baarle, Büsingen, Campione and Jungholz are not there at all. What it does contain can be found by machine. Joining each country's polygons wherever they share an edge, and setting aside its main part, I find 50 detached pieces that touch another country: 13 enclaves with no coast and one neighbour, 1 landlocked exclave with several (Nakhchivan), 19 exclaves with a coast on a continent, such as Kaliningrad, Cabinda and Alaska, and 17 pieces of islands shared with another country, such as Northern Ireland, Timor and Borneo. The United Kingdom has the most, 4: Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and the two base areas on Cyprus.
The 13 enclaves Natural Earth draws are Sokh (Uzbekistan in Kyrgyzstan), Vorukh (Tajikistan in Kyrgyzstan), Likoma Island (Malawi in Mozambique), Madha (Oman in United Arab Emirates), Chizumulu Island (Malawi in Mozambique), Shakhimardan (Uzbekistan in Kyrgyzstan), Artsvashen (Armenia in Azerbaijan), Sarvan (Tajikistan in Uzbekistan), Yukhari Askipara (Azerbaijan in Armenia), Llívia (Spain in France), Barkhudarli (Azerbaijan in Armenia), Nahwa (United Arab Emirates in Oman), Famagusta and eastern Larnaca (Cyprus) (Cyprus in United Kingdom). Its largest detached piece is Alaska (1,427,512 km²) and its smallest Nicaragua's lagoon of Los Portillos, 1.19 km². Two pieces come from the way the map is drawn rather than from the world: the St Lawrence is drawn as water, so Canada south of it becomes a separate piece, and Natural Earth's de facto line puts Crimea with Russia. Like all the borders on this page, that line describes who controls what on the ground according to Natural Earth; it is not an endorsement of any claim.
Wikipedia. I read 35 English Wikipedia articles, saved with their revision ids: the List of enclaves and exclaves and the articles on enclaves, Baarle, the India and Bangladesh enclaves, tripoints, quadripoints, condominiums, terra nullius, landlocked countries, land borders, countries with one neighbour, and each place on the tour. From the list I take the national-level tables (with their own coordinates and areas) and the national-level bulleted lists of semi-enclaves, pene-exclaves and divided islands, one entry per item. Places in the lists without coordinates are placed by the infobox of their own article, or by the Natural Earth piece that is the place, or left off the map. 98 sentences quoted on this page are checked word for word against the saved articles by the code.
Natural Earth. Countries are Natural Earth 1:10m admin-0 units grouped by sovereignty, so Hong Kong counts with China and Gibraltar with the United Kingdom; de facto units such as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Taiwan and Western Sahara are kept as Natural Earth has them, and Palestine is kept separate. Indeterminate zones (Bir Tawil, the Siachen Glacier, the Cyprus buffer zone, Brazilian Island, the Southern Patagonian Ice Field) are not countries. Because neighbouring countries share their vertices exactly, each polygon edge records the countries on either side: shared edges are border (measured on the WGS84 ellipsoid), unshared edges are coast, unless they face water enclosed by land, such as the Caspian, which counts as lake shore. A tripoint is a vertex on three countries' boundaries. A country's main part is its largest, unless the part with its capital is at least half that size.
Wikidata. The Wikidata query returned 2,739 rows for 32 item types, most of them ghettos, ethnic quarters and townships. I keep the 178 items typed as enclaves: 29 match an entry in Wikipedia's national-level list, and the 127 sub-national enclaves with coordinates (towns surrounded by other towns, from Quebec to Spain) form a separate layer, off by default.
Caveats. Wikipedia's list is a crowd-sourced catalogue and its categories overlap; some entries are disputed, de facto or occupied, and I follow the list's wording. Areas are the list's, often rounded. Natural Earth is a generalised map: its areas and lengths differ from official figures, it misses small enclaves and short borders, and it draws de facto lines. Neither source endorses any territorial claim, and nor does this page.