A Detailed Look Into the Enclaves and Exclaves That Determine the Extremely Complex Borders in the World

Scottish videographer WonderWhy created an incredibly informative video explaining in delicious detail the very complex borders created by the numerous enclaves and exclaves around Europe and Asia.

look at the 3 enclaves countries of the world: Vatican City, San Marino and Lesotho. As well as Campione d’Italia, an Italian exclave which is an enclave of Switzerland. I then take things up a notch and look at enclaves within enclaves. The town of Baarle which is in the Netherlands and Belgium is an incredibly complicated border. But not quite as much as the Cooch Behar region of India and Bangladesh. This is followed by a look at the odd situation of Bir Tawil, the only unclaimed land on Earth outside of Antarctica (which is itself a place for complex borders!)
I finish off the video by looking at the island of Cyprus, which may look like a borderless island, but is in fact far from it!

Just a year later, WonderWhy followed up with an equally detailed explanation about the very complicated history of border disputes between several different countries of Europe and Asia.

In this video I look at even more enclaves and exclaves: the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Then I move onto the Uzbekistan-Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border. Then I look at the exclaves of Germany within Belgium, the disputed border between India, Pakistan, and China. Croatia has complex border with 2 of its neighbours – Serbia and Slovenia. I finish by looking at the minor border irregularity between Sweden and Finland.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.