Reply With QuoteNightmare if one country ever left EU.
Just found out about Baarle-Hertog. What an odd geographical phenomenon to have been entirely ignorant of for most of my life.
Nightmare if one country ever left EU.
I’d pay to watch that on NetflixOriginally Posted by Kingstepper
Funnily enough that's the context in which I saw it mentioned. Here's not the place though ...
Yes, although it wasn't a problem during the Second World War, as both countries were occupied by Germany...
Started out with nothing. Still have most of it left.
Another, though much larger and well-known enclave is Kaliningrad - a bit of Russia between Poland and Lithuania.
Find these oddities fascinating, would make an interesting book!
Edit- From subsequent posts see I’ve confused enclave with exclave. A (very detailed!) explanation of the difference is here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclave_and_exclave.
Last edited by Kingstepper; 17th September 2021 at 10:29.
I didn't know about that either. A book would be handy.
The strangest, perhaps, exclave that I've actually visited is the Musandam Penninsula, on the top of the UAE. It's Omani. Some interesting diving up there too.
Definitely the strangest exclave/enclave about which I've ever read, is Besźel and its "twin city" of Ul Qoma (in China Miéville's The City & the City).
Only one I’ve been to was Melilla (Spanish) which is on the north coast of Africa effectively part or Morocco. Going to Morocco through customs there remains one of the more colorful experiences of my life.
No book, but maybe YouTube will do: The Most Complex International Borders in the World?
And there are others...
Some tourist info:
https://m-en.visitbaarle.com/
Entered Morocco via the adjacent port of Nador a few times, will have been similar.
N.Ireland anybody?
Great for the Dutch who want 40 Eurocent per liter cheaper gas...Just found out about Baarle-Hertog. What an odd geographical phenomenon to have been entirely ignorant of for most of my life.
Yes! And not only that!Great for the Dutch who want 40 Eurocent per liter cheaper gas...
Baarle-Hertog has long fascinated me, particularly the mental concept of a counter-enclave i.e. a tiny bit of the Netherlands that sits totally surrounded by & within a bit of Belgium, with that bit of Belgium itself being totally contained within the Netherlands.
It's like a bizarre geographical version of those Russian nesting dolls.
I like visiting quirky places, so it's somewhere I'm very keen to visit, even though I know it's probably more interesting as a concept than in reality.
For fans of this and other oddities, I recently bought this book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...bonnett-review
I haven't read it all, but I agree with the review that some parts are patchier than others, and sometimes the philosophical musings are stretched a bit far, but it's a fun book to dip in & out of.
Another intriguing quirk is Bir Tawil, an orphaned area claimed by neither Egypt or Sudan.
The Baarle-Hertog / Baarle-Nassau (the Dutch part) situation has been going on since the Middle Ages. And even after Belgium became independant in 1830, things stayed as the were.
Fuel is cheaper indeed, and up to 20 yrs ago, the 'Belgian' stores were open on Sunday, the Dutch ones remained closed. The restaurants were open. So, on Sunday thousands of shoppers went to B-H and had lunch and dinner in B-N! Everybody happy.
After WWII a lot of taxes in Belgium and The Netherlands were different. As a result, smuggling was very big. And went completely out of control: armour-plated cars, gunfights with Customs and Excise etc.
Here's an anecdote: I was a small lad back in '64 when my father's company built the first part of a Dow Chemical plant close to the Belgian/Dutch border. Smuggling was still big then: coffee, cigarettes etc. My father paid every employee every Friday afternoon during lunch time. Back then, cash in a brown paper envelop. Later that day a welder came up to my father and said: "Gov, wanna trade what's in your brown envelop for what's in my pocket?" My dad's answer: "No, I know what I've given you!"
Later that day, around 6PM, my dad walked up the parking to his car and he was called: "Gov, you didn't want to trade?" He looked up and saw a VW Samba (with all those windows!) and all windows were covered with bank notes. With a bunch of welders laughing. It turned out that they were day-time welders and night-time smugglers.
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