Some of the oddest things in the world are lines on a map. Borders that run through cafés and living rooms, pieces of one country stranded inside another, places that belong to two jurisdictions at once: most of them are leftovers of treaties, land deals and inheritances that nobody ever tidied up.
The map oddities here explain how those places came to be, how the people who live there deal with them day to day, and what the official records actually say. We rely on governments, national mapping agencies and treaty texts wherever we can.
Maps
Baarle, a village between Breda, Tilburg and Turnhout, is split between Belgian Baarle-Hertog and Dutch Baarle-Nassau. Baarle-Hertog has 22 enclaves surrounded by Dutch territory, and Baarle-Nassau has 8 of its own, 7 of them inside Belgian ones. The split goes back to a land deal in 1198, and a house counts as whichever country its front door is in.
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