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Comment by filvdg | Hacker News Reader

For people who like complex borders

https://www.google.be/maps/place/Baarle-Hertog/

This is a Belgian city enclave within the Netherlands with enclaves of the Netherlands within its borders

Wow. I feel like there should be a CGP Grey video about this. He has one about London vs the City of London and the weird US/Canada border.

Someone also tried to tell me Norwood, Ohio is the largest city within a city (an enclave city), but I can't find a source on that anywhere.

https://youtu.be/oE93J33SfHY

Really great video by Tom Scott about Baarle Hertog

What's weird about US/Canada? I thought it was pretty straightforward. Was this about the "Angle" on Lake of the Woods?

I do not know what is considered weird, but here are some interesting things about the US/Canada border:

https://youtu.be/SxhUsPBFPkU?t=1m46s (Geography Now! Canada - btw awesome channel for people who like geography)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw

The border is defined as a straight line, but was surveyed as a series of slightly wobbly series of lines. They put up thousands of stone pillars, cut out a strip of trees along the border, and it became official.

IIRC there's also some stuff about a disputed island

There's the exclave Point Roberts, Washington (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0408/feature7/), which falls ever so slightly south of the 49th parallel.

I once visited Port Roberts just to see the border crossing. I drove in from the Canadian side, parked my car, and walked across the border into the U.S. without being challenged. No one asked for my passport. As far as I could tell, no one even noticed that I had crossed the border. But when I tried to walk back into Canada the Canadians gave me a pretty hard time and almost didn't let me back in. It was an interesting experience.

I've visited there too. Drove in both directions, seemed like not a big deal.

I heard that kids there go to school in Blaine, which means 4 international border crossings every day!

Newark is completely surrounded by Fremont (California) and has over 40,000 residents and is over 13 square miles in area, so if it's not the largest, it's at least near the top.

If we discount natural borders like the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica borders only Los Angeles and has twice as many residents.

Not far from Fremont, Piedmont is completely surrounded by Oakland. 1.6 square miles, 10k residents.

The City of Los Angeles has a really interesting shape:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Angeles,+CA/@34.091182...

Los Angeles has very strange borders. West Hollywood and Beverly Hills are independent enclaves, and it has an odd tendril stretching down to Long Beach. I remember being delighted when Google Maps started outlining city borders - I had always wondered exactly what LA's looked like.

Another fun one is San Diego, which does indeed touch Mexico, but to get from downtown to the border and stay within city limits you'll have to get on a boat and stay within a narrow band of water stretching down the bay to San Ysidro.

See:

https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/legacy//plannin...

https://www.maptechnica.com/city-map/San+Diego/CA/0666000

The YouTube channel WonderWhy has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtLxZiiuaXs) on complex international borders wrt enclaves and exclaves.

I think he did one about enclaves and exclaves.

Grey did make a brief video about countries within countries in his Bizzare Borders videos [1] which might interest you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vui-qGCfXuA

Theres also this place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island which is disputed by Canada and Denmark. Apparently the Danes leave a bottle of schnapps for the Canadians and the Canadians leave a bottle of Canadian Club and a note saying welcome to Canada.

Until this past year, the India/Bangladesh border was similar - there was even a triple-deep enclave (india inside bangladesh inside india inside bangladesh... I think...). They just recently did a land swap to make the border more sane, and also easier on the inhabitants, who didn't have freedom of movement between the parts.

https://youtu.be/gtLxZiiuaXs?t=5m10s

Yes, that third-order enclave was Dahala Khagrabari (#51): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahala_Khagrabari

It really brings to mind "City and the City".

https://www.amazon.com/City-Random-House-Readers-Circle/dp/0...

Really great book! Really one of the most interesting thing to come out in the past few years.

Indeed, China Mieville has spoken about it as an influence when writing The City and The City.

From Wikipedia:

Some houses in the town of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau are divided between the two countries. At one time, according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border this simply meant that the customers had to move to a table on the Belgian side.

The border goes through some houses as well, and the country you're in is deemed as which side of the border your front door is on. Apparently there has been a house or two that moved their front door across the border, in order to benefit from lower taxes or somesuch.

There are many such enclaves between India and Bangladesh.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/02/enclaves_betwe...

A lot of them are recently sorted out by the governments, by exchanging land.

Our frontiers are sometimes a bit fuzzy to say the last [0] and there is also this place [1] where you can literally be in 3 countries at the same times

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3378842/Belgium-Neth...

[1] https://www.google.be/maps/@50.7543794,6.0212649,17z

The second one is not all that interesting, as any country that borders more than 1 other country would have a point like that ;)

Belgium should have 3

Not necessarily - If you have a body of water on the top and the bottom, and two different countries on each side, then there's no spot you can be in 3 countries at once. See: America

Now that's just unnecessary.

I want to go to there.

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