Spain’s Strangest Borders 🤯 Unexpected Hidden Neighbors 👀 #spain #border #learn #map #geography

Did you know Spain is the country with the strangest borders? On the map, it looks like Spain has only two land neighbors, France and Portugal. But in reality, there are many more. Just the border with France creates a few unusual oddities, for example, the town of Livia, which lies entirely within French territory, only two kilometers from the border, but it is Spanish territory. This phenomenon is called an enclave, and moving further west, you'll find an even more surprising case, as an island. Long ago, Spain and France couldn't agree on how to divide the island, because the border ran right through the middle, so they decided to take turns owning it. For the first half of the year, the island belongs to Spain, and for the second half, the border shifts and it becomes French territory. There is also another neighbor hidden between Spain and France, and Dora. It's one of the smallest countries in the world, with a population of about 80,000 and almost half the size of New York City. But Spain has another hidden neighbor, and it's much larger, the United Kingdom. Even though Britain lies far to the north, it holds an overseas territory at the very southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, Gibraltar, which for centuries has been a point of dispute between Spain and the UK, as it controls access to the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait itself divides two continents, Europe and Africa. But despite this, Spain is the only European country that shares a land border with Africa, thanks to three Spanish enclaves bordering Morocco, another unexpected neighbor. Two of them are the cities of Suda and Malila, and the third is a tiny strip of land that was once an island, but over time became connected to the mainland by a narrow Isthmus, creating the shortest land border in the world, just 85 meters long.