An enclave is a piece of territory completely surrounded by one other country. An exclave is a piece of a country that is cut off from the rest of it. Many places are both at once: Büsingen am Hochrhein, for example, is an exclave of Germany and an enclave inside Switzerland. A pene-exclave, such as Point Roberts in Washington state, is reachable over land only by passing through another country. Exclaves range from Kaliningrad, a Russian region of about one million people between Poland and Lithuania, down to tiny plots in the Belgian village of Baarle-Hertog. Maps show where these places are, but the best way to understand how they work is to look at the roads, paths and doorways people use to get in and out of them. This article visits six of those crossings.
Baarle: A Border Painted Through Shop Doorways
In the town of Baarle, the international border runs along the streets, marked on the pavement with white crosses labelled NL and B. Some of the lines go straight through shops and houses. The Belgian municipality of Baarle-Hertog had 2,935 residents in 2021 on 7.48 square kilometres, split into 26 separate parcels. Twenty-two of those parcels are Belgian exclaves completely surrounded by the Netherlands. Inside some of those exclaves are seven pieces of the Netherlands, making them enclaves within enclaves. The Dutch parts all belong to the neighbouring municipality of Baarle-Nassau.
The pattern comes from medieval land deals, sales and swaps between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant, which the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht confirmed plot by plot. When Dutch rules made restaurants close earlier than Belgian ones, diners at tables on the line simply moved to the Belgian side. During the First World War the arrangement had more serious consequences. The German army could not reach the Belgian plots without crossing the neutral Netherlands, so they became a refuge, and a clandestine radio transmitter operated from them. Today the Belgian side sells a lot of fireworks to Dutch customers, because Belgium's fireworks laws are less strict. Our guide to Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau maps the plots in detail.
Tin Bigha: 178 by 85 Metres Into Dahagram–Angarpota
The Bangladeshi enclave of Dahagram–Angarpota lies only about 200 metres from the rest of Bangladesh. That gap is Indian land in West Bengal's Cooch Behar district, and the enclave's only link to the Bangladeshi mainland runs across it: the Tin Bigha Corridor, a strip 178 metres long and 85 metres wide. Under the Land Boundary Agreement signed by Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 16 May 1974, India kept the southern half of South Berubari, and Bangladesh kept Dahagram–Angarpota along with access to it through the corridor, which India was to lease "in perpetuity".
Transferring sovereignty required amending India's constitution, and for political reasons that did not happen, so the corridor did not open until 1992. At first it was open for only 12 daylight hours a day, which caused real hardship because the enclave had no hospital or police station. Under an agreement signed on 6 September 2011, the corridor now stays open almost around the clock, and Sheikh Hasina opened it officially on 19 October 2011. India's Border Security Force still controls the gates.
Dahagram–Angarpota is the last survivor of a set of enclaves that once included the world's only third-order enclave. Before 2015 the main body of Bangladesh contained 102 Indian enclaves, which themselves contained 21 Bangladeshi counter-enclaves, and one of those contained Dahala Khagrabari, the world's only third-order enclave. India in turn contained 71 Bangladeshi enclaves. A joint census in 2010 counted 51,549 people living in them. On the night of 31 July 2015, the two countries exchanged 162 enclaves, with 111 going to Bangladesh and 51 to India. Residents could choose which country's citizenship to take.
Llívia and the N-154: Spain's Road Through France
Llívia, in the Cerdanya valley of the eastern Pyrenees, is a Spanish town of 1,562 people (2025) surrounded by France. It is an exclave because of a technicality in the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, which gave France the "villages" of northern Cerdanya. Llívia was the old capital of the district and counted as a town rather than a village, so it remained Spanish. The 1660 Treaty of Llívia confirmed the arrangement, and the Treaty of Bayonne ratified the border in 1866.
The crossing is a road over a strip of French land about 1.6 km wide, in the communes of Ur and Bourg-Madame, linking Llívia with the rest of Spain near Puigcerdà. Both countries own parts of the route: in Spain it is the N-154, and in France it forms part of Route nationale 20 and the RD68. Before the Schengen rules took effect in 1995, it was a "neutral road", open without customs checks to both French and Spanish traffic. Under Franco, residents needed special passes to cross France to reach the rest of Spain. In the 1980s the road was the scene of the "war of the stop signs", when French authorities repeatedly put up stop signs on the route and protesters took them down overnight. Today there are no border formalities, and people from both countries use the shared hospital in Puigcerdà.
Point Roberts: 25 Miles Through Canada to Reach the US
Point Roberts is the southern tip of the Tsawwassen peninsula, south of Vancouver, and it lies south of the 49th parallel. When the 1846 Oregon Treaty made that parallel the border between British and U.S. territory, this piece of the peninsula ended up in the United States, with Canada on its only land side. The community had 1,191 residents in the 2020 census. To drive to the rest of Washington state, they must cross into Canada, travel 25 miles (40 km) through British Columbia, and then cross back into the U.S. The alternative is to go by boat or private plane across Boundary Bay.
Point Roberts depends heavily on its single road crossing, and the town has been hit hard whenever that crossing has been restricted. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, tighter security caused long delays for residents. When Canada closed the border to non-essential travel in March 2020, Point Roberts lost about 80 percent of its business along with hundreds of seasonal residents, even though it had no confirmed COVID-19 cases. Normally its population rises to about 4,500 in summer, mostly Canadians with holiday homes.
Büsingen am Hochrhein: German Village, Swiss Customs
Büsingen is a German village of about 1,548 people on 7.62 square kilometres beside the High Rhine, surrounded by the Swiss cantons of Schaffhausen, Zürich and Thurgau. Its crossings into Switzerland have had no checks since 4 October 1967, when a treaty signed in 1964 took effect. That treaty defined the exclave's boundaries, formally put Büsingen in the Swiss customs area, and handed the tiny German exclave of Verenahof, which had three houses, to Switzerland. Getting from Büsingen to the rest of Germany still means crossing Swiss territory. During the Second World War, German soldiers on leave had to leave their weapons at the border in Gailingen, and Swiss customs officers lent them greatcoats to cover their uniforms for the short trip home through the Swiss village of Dörflingen.
Day-to-day life in Büsingen mixes the two countries. Most people pay in Swiss francs, although the euro is legal tender, and electricity comes from Switzerland and is billed in francs. The village has two postal codes, the German DE-78266 and the Swiss CH-8238, and letters can carry either country's stamps. Schaffhausen cantonal police may make arrests in the village, but no more than ten Swiss officers can be there at one time. When Switzerland joined the Schengen Area in 2008, residents no longer faced ID checks when returning to Germany through Swiss territory.
Kaliningrad: A Russian Region Behind Two EU Borders
Kaliningrad Oblast is Russia's westernmost region, on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania. It had about one million residents at the 2021 census. Until 1945 it was the northern part of German East Prussia, and its capital was the city of Königsberg. The Soviet Union annexed it after the Second World War, and as the German population fled or was expelled, Soviet settlers, mostly ethnic Russians, moved in. It became separated from the rest of Russia in 1990, when Lithuania declared independence. Once Poland and Lithuania joined NATO and the EU, every land route from Kaliningrad to Russia passed through members of both. Its port at Baltiysk is Russia's only Baltic port that stays ice-free all winter.
The Suwałki Gap: 65 Kilometres Between Kaliningrad and Belarus
The EU refused Russia's requests for visa-free travel across its territory. Instead, Russian citizens travelling by rail or road between Kaliningrad and mainland Russia use two special permits, the Facilitated Transit Document and the Facilitated Rail Transit Document. The shortest land route to Russia's ally Belarus crosses the Suwałki Gap, a 65-km strip of Polish land along the Lithuanian border that separates Kaliningrad from Belarus. In the 1990s and early 2000s Russia asked for an extraterritorial corridor through it, and Poland, Lithuania and the EU refused. In summer 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Lithuania and the EU restricted Russian transit as part of their sanctions, and the gap, which has carried great strategic weight since Poland and the Baltic states joined NATO, has drawn even closer attention. For the region's history and ports, see our explainer what is Kaliningrad.