The Weirdest Borders in the World
Borders can get really, really strange. Today, I’ll share some obscure, odd, and crazy border related facts.
The US….US border?
The United States has over 580 miles of wall supposedly intended to delineate the border between Mexico and itself.
However, sometimes this border goes wrong. It turns out that due to various permits, zoning laws, contracts, and similar legalese, the U.S. is not always able to build a wall wherever it wants along the border. In quite a few cases, the U.S. government decided to YOLO and just build a wall miles inside of the U.S. border, essentially quarantining some U.S. citizens outside of the U.S. via a wall.
For instance, a wall was built that cut part of a college campus in half, and one farmer had a wall built between his farm and his barn.
Enclaves
An enclave is a country that is situated entirely within another country. For instance, the country of Lesotho is an enclave of South Africa, and the Vatican is an enclave of Italy.
Enclaves are cool and all, but we must go deeper. You see, there are a few instances throughout the world of 2nd order enclaves.
A 2nd order enclave occurs when you have a country A, and a country B, such that some portion of country A is fully surrounded by country B, which is fully surrounded by country B. Let’s look at some examples.
The United Arab Emirates
Below is a picture of part of the United Arab Emirates. Oman has an exclave (an area of land it owns that is totally separated from its primary land-mass) inside of the United Arab Emirates, which is shown in red below. However, the United Arab Emirates owns a small piece of land inside of this Omani exclave, which is shown below in green. So, we have a piece of the UAE, totally surrounded by a piece of Oman which is totally physically separate from the Omani mainland, which is then surrounded by the UAE.
Netherlands and Belgium
Think that’s weird? It gets weirder. There is a town on the b0rder of the Netherlands and Belgium called Baarle, and here’s a picture of how this town is divided between Netherlands and Belgium.
Inside of the Netherlands’ side of the border are tens of distinct Belgian exclaves, and many of these Belgian exclaves have Netherlands enclaves inside of them. And the craziest part is, not only are all of these borders actively drawn in the town (some of which pass through restaurants and living rooms), but different laws between the two countries are actively enforced inside of each exclave and enclave.
For example, for a long time there were different laws regulating how late a restaurant could stay open in the Netherlands and in Belgium. As a result, since many restaurants are cross-border (since literally every other road in this town has some sort of border on it), patrons would have to get up and move tables if they were sitting on the side of the country which closed earlier.
Now, you might wonder: “If a border passes through a store or home, which country is it considered part of?” Well, the answer is that a residence is considered part of whichever country its front door is in. This works out great until you consider the fact that there is a house with a front door which spans both countries…
Don’t worry though — the governments decided on a “simple” solution. You can see in this picture that the above door has two house numbers and two doorbells (one number and doorbell on each side of the door). The building actually has two addresses, one in the Netherlands and one in Belgium, and is considered part of both countries.
Bangladesh
It gets worse. The India-Bangladesh border is so convoluted, so insane, that it alone includes over 80% of the world’s enclaves: 106 Indian enclaves within Bangladesh, and 92 Bangladeshi enclaves within India. Of these combined enclaves, 24 are 2nd order enclaves, and one is a third order enclave.
That’s right. There is an Indian parcel, inside of a Bangladeshi enclave, inside of an Indian enclave, inside of Bangladesh. This is the only third order enclave in the world.
How in god’s name did this happen? Well two bros, the Raja of Koch Bihar and the Maharaja of Rangpur, would evidently wager parcels of land in this area as part of card games and chess games they would play. This wagering led to a highly fragmented separation between Rangpur and Koch Bihar, and when India was partitioned in 1947, Rangpur went to East Pakistan while Koch Bihar stayed in India.
However, unlike in Europe, Bangladesh and India are not friends. As a result, while residents of Belgium and the Netherlands can generally freely move between the regions, people in these Bangladeshi and Indian enclaves are somewhat trapped. Border control is very strict, and many of these enclaves are extremely poor, with the people having no real access to resources, schooling, or other essentials.
Things became so bad that India and Bangladesh finally decided to try to do something about it. On May 7, 2015, the two countries finalized an agreement that would trade much off these enclaves, with India getting 51 Bangladeshi enclaves, and Bangladesh getting 11 Indian enclaves.
Egypt and Sudan’s Borders
Egypt and Sudan have a particularly interesting border rivalry. Each disputes what the Egypt-Sudan border is, with Sudan thinking it is the green line below, and Egypt thinking it is the red line below.
These disputed borders lead to two “contested” areas of land: Bir Tawil, and Hala’ib Triangle. Note the implications of these border lines and where each of these land areas is: both countries claim they own Hala’ib, and neither country says it owns Bir Tawil.
Interestingly, this makes Bir Tawil the only unclaimed landmass in the world outside of Antartica. Why is this the case? Because Hala’ib is much more desirable land (it has access to the red sea, it is more habitable, it is larger, etc.), and because if either side were to claim ownership over Bir Tawil, it would weaken their claim to Hala’ib. The result is that Bir Tawil is essentially empty — no people live there, and it is hypothesized that there is not a single building in the entire region.
Antarctica
We think of Antarctica as a place that is essentially uninhabited and unclaimed, but it actually has some of the most interesting territorial and border disputes in the world. Below is a map of the land currently claimed in the continent.
You may notice some peculiarities about this image. Notably:
- The Southwest of Antarctica is entirely unclaimed
- There is a triple overlapping region in the northwest that Chile, Argentina, and the U.K. all claim
- There are two double overlapping regions in the northwest — one between the U.K. and Argentina, and another between the U.K. and Chile.
But what makes this all even weirder is that, technically, none of these claims matter, because every single one of these countries has signed the Antarctic Treaty, which basically states that none of these claims imply any sovereignty to the claiming nations.
What makes this even weirder, though, is that the U.S. and Russia somehow connived their way into getting exceptions to the Antarctic Treaty, meaning each has reserved the right to make claims to Antarctica in the future, and have those claims officially recognized.
So how does this all come together? Today, Antarctica has multiple regions which are openly disputed, yet those disputes are meaningless because of a treaty, and while America and Russia technically have no claims to the continent today, in reality they have the right to own any land in Antarctica they want, regardless of all the claims you see above.
Diomede Islands
The Diomede Islands are a pair of islands located barely a mile away from each other between the U.S.A. and Russia. Russia owns “Big Diomede”, the bigger island, and the U.S. owns “Little Diomede”, the smaller island.
These islands have one peculiar characteristic — they are split by the international date line. As a result, even though these islands are just about a mile away from each other, and can even be walked between at certain times of year, they have a 23 hour time difference between them. For this reason, the islands are sometimes called “Tomorrow Island” and “Yesterday Island”.
The Korean Table
Many of us are familiar with the border between North and South Korea, arguably one of the most famous borders in the world. However, there is a little-known fact about this border that is kind of fun — the border literally splits a table in two:
One side of this table is owned by North Korea, and one side is owned by South Korea, allowing officials from each country to sit down and negotiate with one another without ever leaving their country.
The Most Valuable Glacier in the World
The Siachen Glacier is nestled between Pakistan and India, and has caused one of the most pointless border disputes in the world.
You see — the Siachen Glacier is totally inhospitable. It is 20,000 feet high, and it is nothing but ice and snow, and no one lives there. So, when India and Pakistan were originally laying out their borders, they just decided to say that the border was defined somewhere on the glacier, but neither side wanted to send up any people to delineate it any further.
This worked well for a while, but the peace didn’t last long. Pakistan started issuing some permits for people to try to climb the glacier, and upon hearing this, India acted like a jealous pre-schooler, and immediately laid claim to the entire glacier. It didn’t stop there, though. India actually sent a force of 300 troops to climb the glacier and claim this useless land, just so Pakistanis couldn’t climb it.
In response, Pakistan sent up its own troops to try to forcefully claim some of the land itself, and the result has been a constant back and forth between the nations for decades. The worst part? Countless soldiers have died defending this worthless glacier, and most didn’t even die from battle — they just died from the extreme elevation.
Cyprus
To finish our tour of crazy borders, lets go back to Lefko Charalambous’s neck of the woods. Cyprus is a tiny little island near Greece that is split into two pieces: the Republic of Cyprus (aka Greek Cyprus), and Northern Cyprus (aka Turkish Cyprus). And then the U.K. decided to go ahead and YOLO some parts of the island too, leaving us with the following geographic distribution.
Immediately, we can see some oddities. First, note the northern Cyprus exclave in the top left corner of the southern region. Second, note the U.K.’s two, distinct exclaves in green. Third, note that the eastern U.K. region actually has a number of southern Cyprus enclaves inside of it. Let’s take a closer look at this region to see just how odd this eastern U.K. region is:
The four areas filled with white and outlined in red are the four enclaves of southern Cyprus inside of the U.K.’s eastern landmass. The southern two enclaves are so close that they are literally only separated by a single British road. That’s right — southern Cyprus has two, separated regions, split solely by a British road that goes right in between them.
The British sure like their roads though, because this is not the only place this sort of thing happens in Cyprus.
See that long, winding, tiny yellow strip? It is a single British road that goes right in between Greek and Turkish Cyprus. This is the only area on the entire island where Greek and Turkish Cyprus aren’t split up by an official buffer zone, but rather by some Brits cruising around in their cars.
How did this shit happen? Cyprus used to be a British colony. Eventually, Cyprus became independent, and England decided they wanted to keep the land near some of their military bases. Then, Turkey eventually invaded the island, and claimed much of the northeastern land, leading to today’s world of an island with enclaves, exclaves, international borders defined by random British roads, and a giant buffer zone constantly guarded by U.N. peacekeepers.
