Enclaves and Exclaves: Countries Inside Countries

The two terms describe the same geographic oddity from different points of view, and it is worth getting them straight.

Definitions

• Enclave — a territory entirely surrounded by a single other country. Described from the outside, looking in.
• Exclave — a part of a country that is geographically separated from the main part and can only be reached by passing through another country (or by sea or air). Described from the country it belongs to, looking out.

A piece of land can be both. Nakhchivan is an exclave of Azerbaijan (cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan by Armenian territory) and it is also almost, but not quite, an enclave. A true enclave that is also an exclave — surrounded by one country and separated from its parent — is rare; historically the cleanest example was Baarle-Hertog's parcels.

Whole countries that are enclaves

• Lesotho — a mountainous kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa. It is the only independent country that lies wholly above 1,000 m in elevation.
• San Marino and Vatican City — both entirely surrounded by Italy. The Vatican is the smallest country in the world and sits inside the city of Rome.

Famous exclaves

• Kaliningrad — a region of Russia between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast, with no land connection to the rest of Russia. Formerly the German city of Königsberg, it was annexed after the Second World War.
• Nakhchivan — an autonomous republic of Azerbaijan separated from the rest of the country by a strip of Armenia.
• Alaska — an exclave of the United States, reachable overland only through Canada.
• Cabinda — an oil-rich province of Angola separated from the rest of the country by a narrow strip of the Democratic Republic of the Congo along the Congo River.
• Musandam — an exclave of Oman on the Strait of Hormuz, cut off from the rest of Oman by the United Arab Emirates.
• Ceuta and Melilla — Spanish cities on the North African coast, entirely surrounded by Morocco and the sea; Spain's only land borders outside continental Europe.

The extreme case: Baarle

On the Belgium–Netherlands border, the town of Baarle contains around 30 Belgian exclaves inside the Netherlands, and several of those contain Dutch counter-exclaves — Dutch land inside Belgian land inside the Netherlands. The border is marked with crosses set into the pavement, runs through shops, cafés and at least one house, and a family's nationality for some legal purposes can depend on which side of the building the front door is on. The tangle dates from a series of medieval land deals between noble houses that were never rationalised.