A big welcome to all our new followers from recent days.
Once a week we do a thread about geo stuff, this week we turn our attention to one of the most geographically strange countries of them all: France 🇫🇷
Join us for this week's #geoweirdness thread
1/n
2/ Where to begin?
First up, what most people think of as 🇫🇷 France is actually only "Metropolitan France"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_France
But France is much bigger and includes many other territories.
3/ As we covered in our #geoweirdness thread from a few weeks ago, 🇫🇷France's longest border is, perhaps surprisingly, with ... 🇧🇷 Brazil along the border of the French Département de la Guyane (French Guiana 🇬🇫)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana
See our thread on Brazilian #geoweirdness
https://en.osm.town/@opencage/109851103892999726
4/ France 🇫🇷 also includes the islands Saint Pierre and Miquelon 🇵🇲 (ISO code "PM") just off the coast of Canada 🇨🇦
5/ France 🇫🇷 has numerous Caribbean islands, including Saint Martin where it shares a land border with the Kingdom of the Netherlands 🇳🇱 territory Sint Maarten 🇸🇽
6/ France 🇫🇷 once had a territorial dispute with ... Mexico 🇲🇽 regarding ownership of tiny Clipperton Island in the Pacific.
Arbitration determined it to belong to France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipperton_Island
Here's our recent Mexican #geoweirdness thread
https://en.osm.town/@opencage/109851103892999726
7/ As we mentioned in last week's thread - France 🇫🇷 and Italy 🇮🇹 have an open border dispute about the exact course of their border on Mont Blanc 🏔️ in the Alps
8/ France 🇫🇷 also borders the micro state of Monaco 🇲🇨 on the Mediterranean coast.
Monaco is a fully independent country, but uses the French postal system.
9/ Another tiny nation bordering France 🇫🇷 is land-locked Andorra 🇦🇩.
One bizarre remnant of medieval tradition is that the ruler of France -previously the king, now the president (currently Emmanuel Macron) - also holds the position of "Co-Prince of Andorra", along with the Bishop of Urgell.
10/ Not far from Andorra 🇦🇩 is the village of Llívia. It is a tiny bit of Spanish 🇪🇸 territory entirely surrounded by France 🇫🇷
11/ Spain 🇪🇸 and France 🇫🇷 have a delightful border dispute over the tiny Pheasant Island island in the middle of the Bidasoa river. The solution: the island changes ownership every 6 months.
12/ Many countries have dependent territories, and so does France 🇫🇷, but it even has the "overseas country" (Pays d'outre-mer in French) of French Polynesia 🇵🇫
13/ Further west from there we have New Caledonia 🇳🇨 and France's territories in the Indian Ocean: Réunion 🇷🇪 and Mayotte 🇾🇹. All part of France 🇫🇷.
Indeed the world's longest regularly scheduled non-stop domestic flight is Paris to Réunion, over 9,000km
14/ of course we haven't yet mentioned France's 🇫🇷 tiny Indian Ocean islands or Antarctic claims, all bundled into something known as the French Southern and Antarctic Lands 🇹🇫 (ISO code: TF)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Southern_and_Antarctic_Lands
15/ Speaking of ISO codes, another geographic oddity is that France 🇫🇷 is one of the few countries with multiple levels of ISO 3166-2 (country subdivision) codes, as you can see here in a response from our geocoding API
16/ So as you see, France 🇫🇷 is one of the geographically strangest countries in the world.
And the situation is dynamic as we saw in this incident on the border with Belgium 🇧🇪 last year:
17/ We hope you enjoyed our look at the geographic oddities of France 🇫🇷. Thanks for reading (and sharing).
https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads
We have many more threads about specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc listed on our blog. Most still on twitter, but over time we are moving them here to mastodon. Enjoy.
We'll feature more countries in coming weeks and months
#geoweirdness
18/ one final bonus France 🇫🇷 #geoweirdness toot, because why not?
As found on reddit (of course), and presented without comment.
@opencage Wow, that is an interesting thread!
I knew many of these facts separately, but never really thought about how many weird things France has!
@IIVQ many regions have their own TLDs (.cat for Catalonia for example), nothing unique about Réunion.
Historically many dependent territories also have their own ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes. Some background: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-determine-the-iso-codes-for-a-location
@opencage
I believe France is one of only 2, 4 or 5* countries which are in all four hemispheres
* 2, 4 or 5 depending on the definition: https://rants.au/@sabik/109646013501316101
@[email protected] In summary, countries which are in all four hemispheres: • Kiribati, France — integral, permanently settled parts of the country are in each of the four hemispheres • US, UK — permanently settled parts of the country are in each of the four hemispheres, but some of them are not fully integral (US unincorporated territories, UK overseas territories) • Norway — parts of the country are in each of the four hemispheres, but one of them is neither permanently settled nor fully integral (dependent territory) and another is integral but not permanently settled
@sabik On the final Friday of the month we play a geo trivia game, we had a similar question about number of continents. See:
https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/geotrivia-feb2021-multicontinent-countries
@opencage Contrary to many other European countries, many (not all) of France's "colonies" are proper France and thus part of the European Union. Thus, the most Western (Saint-Martin), Southern and Eastern (Both Réunion) points of the EU are "in" France.
Réunion, together with Mayotte, are the only parts of the EU south of the equator.
#GeographicalExtremity
(The Northernmost is Finland)
(And yes, I have visited the southern- and easternmost points ánd done the longest domestic flight!)
Pierre-Yves ANDRE
OpenCage 👉🌍
Dee Toher
Pierre Lebeaupin
Dan York
Michaele Cutaya
NiceMicro
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IIVQ
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sabik
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