enclaves
I’m fascinated by little perculiarities in our world. There’s a country, which is soverign over a city, which is only 0.2 square miles in size. That’s 108 acres, much smaller than a large urban park. (Also of note with the Holy See/ Vatican is that there are various Vacitan enclaves on separated from the Vatican and surrounded by Italy, including Castel Gandolfo and Patricrchal Basilicas, but they’re sort of like embassies with extraterritorial status.)
People also seem to be fascinated that Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), where my mom spent much of her youth, is completely surrounded by South Africa. Well that makes a lot more sense to me than Büsingen which is a German town completely separated from Germany and surrounded by Switzerland. It is separated by about 1km from the rest of Germany.
It’d be kind of cool to live there though. You get alternate addresses and telephone numbers if you want people to call or write to you in Germany or Switzerland. You also get to live and work in Switzerland without a visa after living there for ten years.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:17 am
I found that info very interesting. I hadn’t been aware of Buesingen. I read through the Wikipedia article on Buesingen and found mention of a former German exclave also embedded in Switzerland, called Verenahof, which involved only 3 houses and less than a dozen people. Anyway, I discovered a very interesting site by following a link off that page: http://exclave.info/
They have info about all kinds of instances of this sort of thing. If you’re interested in this, you should check it out.