Countries Hiding Inside Countries
Only three countries on Earth sit completely inside just one other country. Lesotho is wrapped entirely by South Africa. The other two, San Marino among them, are surrounded by Italy. Each is an enclave: a territory fully enclosed by the land of a single other state.
The word itself has a neat origin. It is French, first seen in the mid-15th century, and it comes from a casual Latin verb meaning "to close with a key". At first it was a property law term. It described a plot of land boxed in by someone else's land, so the owner could only reach it by crossing a neighbour. The law gave that owner a right to pass through. The first diplomatic document to use the word was the Treaty of Madrid, signed in 1526.
In India, people often call an enclave a "pocket". In old British paperwork, such scraps of land were known as detached parts.
Enclave or Exclave? It Depends Where You Stand
An exclave is a piece of a country cut off from the main part by foreign land. Many exclaves are also enclaves. It all depends on the point of view: the same patch is an exclave to the country that owns it and an enclave to the country wrapped around it. The word exclave was simply built backwards from enclave.
Then there is the semi-enclave, which would be fully surrounded if it did not also touch the sea. Monaco, The Gambia and Brunei all fit. There is a simple test for a whole country: it must border only one other state, and its land border must be longer than its coastline. That is why Portugal, which also borders just one country, does not count. It has a huge coast.
Canada and Denmark used to border just one state each, too. That changed in 2022, when the two split Hans Island and became neighbours on land.
Europe's Border Puzzles
Some of the strangest cases sit inside Switzerland. Büsingen am Hochrhein belongs to Germany, and Campione d'Italia belongs to Italy, yet both are fully surrounded by Swiss land. Each is a true enclave, meaning you cannot reach it without passing through one single other country. Most national-level true enclaves left today are in Asia and Europe.
Then there is Baarle, where the Netherlands and Belgium chose to keep their tangle of enclaves and exclaves. Since both countries are in the European Union and the Schengen Area, people and goods move between the pieces with few or no limits.
History used to be even messier. In feudal Europe, land was bought, sold and inherited in bits, and those bits often ended up surrounded by other domains. Before 1866, Prussia alone was made of more than 270 separate pieces. West Berlin also had 12 small outlying patches, such as Steinstücken, some cut off by only a few meters.
The Day 162 Enclaves Vanished
Living in an enclave can be a daily headache. People have struggled with travel rights, bringing in goods, currency, power and water, and health care. So over time, most countries have tried to get rid of them.
The biggest cleanup happened on 1 August 2015. India and Bangladesh put a Land Boundary Agreement into effect and swapped 162 first-order enclaves: 111 Indian and 51 Bangladeshi. That swap also wiped out about two dozen second-order enclaves and one third-order enclave. In total, 197 India and Bangladesh enclaves disappeared at once.
That single day erased two-thirds of all the national-level enclaves that existed at the time. People living in them had complained that they were, in effect, stateless. After the exchange, only one remained: Bangladesh's Dahagram and Angarpota enclave.
Places You Can Only Drive to Through Another Country
Some places are not technically enclaves but feel like them. A pene-exclave is part of a country that you can only reach easily, especially by car, through another country. The term was defined in 1959.
Point Roberts in Washington state is the classic example. It touches United States waters, but by land you can only get there through Canada. Minnesota's Northwest Angle works the same way. In Austria, the Kleinwalsertal valley is cut off from the rest of the country by high mountains with no roads, so you enter it from Germany to the north. The Spanish village of Os de Civís is reached from Andorra. The hamlet of Boston Corner was once a pene-exclave of Massachusetts, walled off by mountains, until it was handed over to New York.
And embassies? Despite their special rights, most foreign-owned land does not count as an enclave at all.
