The countries that border only one other country

Canada, Portugal, Denmark, Qatar, South Korea and Papua New Guinea each have only one land neighbour. So do the United Kingdom and Ireland, with each other. The full list and the stories behind it.

Most countries have several neighbours. A handful have exactly one. They fall into three groups: countries that share an island, countries on the edge of a continent, and countries completely surrounded by another.

Surrounded on every side

Three countries are completely enclosed by another: Lesotho by South Africa, and San Marino and Vatican City by Italy. Lesotho is the largest of them by far, at about 30,000 square kilometres, and it is the only one of the three that is not a city-state. It is also mountainous enough that all of its territory lies above 1,000 metres, which makes it the country with the highest lowest point in the world.

Sharing an island

Several countries share an island and have no other land border. The United Kingdom and Ireland share the island of Ireland, through Northern Ireland. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share Hispaniola. Timor-Leste shares Timor with Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea shares New Guinea with Indonesia. Brunei sits on Borneo, which it shares with Malaysia and Indonesia, but it only touches Malaysia. Brunei is also split in two by a strip of Malaysian land.

The edge of a continent

Canada has the longest border between two countries anywhere in the world, with the United States. Including the Alaska border, it runs for nearly 9,000 kilometres. Portugal has had essentially the same border with Spain since the Middle Ages, one of the oldest stable borders in Europe. Denmark’s only land neighbour is Germany, along the base of the Jutland peninsula.

South Korea is effectively an island for travellers, because its only land border, with North Korea, is closed. Qatar sits on a peninsula in the Gulf and its only land border is with Saudi Arabia.

Gambia: a river with a country around it

Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa. It is a thin strip following the Gambia River inland from the Atlantic, surrounded on three sides by Senegal and on the fourth by the sea. Its borders follow the course of the river, which is why the country is so narrow.

In the games

One-neighbour countries are dead ends in Overland. A route can end at Portugal or Canada but can never pass through one. In Borderline, where you name a country from its outline, the shapes of countries like Gambia, Brunei and Lesotho are among the most recognisable, because they are defined by what surrounds them.

One step up: countries with two neighbours

A slightly longer list of countries border exactly two others. They include the United States (Canada and Mexico), Mongolia (China and Russia), Nepal and Bhutan (both between China and India), Sweden (Finland and Norway), the Netherlands (Belgium and Germany), Andorra (France and Spain), Lebanon (Israel and Syria), Kuwait (Iraq and Saudi Arabia), Uruguay (Argentina and Brazil) and Panama (Colombia and Costa Rica), along with others.

Several of these are buffer states, squeezed between two larger powers. Mongolia, Nepal and Bhutan are the classic examples. Each sits between two of the most populous countries on Earth and borders nothing else.

When the only border closes

Having one neighbour makes a country unusually exposed to that neighbour’s decisions. Spain closed its land frontier with Gibraltar in 1969, cutting the territory off by land for over a decade. The crossing partly reopened in 1982 and fully in 1985. In 2017 Saudi Arabia closed its border with Qatar as part of a blockade by several Gulf states, which shut Qatar’s only land route to the rest of the world until the dispute ended in January 2021. Qatar kept trading by sea and air throughout.

South Korea is the extreme case. Its one land border, with North Korea, has been closed to ordinary travel since the Korean War. In practice South Korea trades and travels as if it were an island, and for an Overland route, crossing into North Korea is the only way out.

Play Borderline →

Sources and method

Land borders are from Natural Earth’s public-domain Admin 0 country boundaries, the same data behind Overland and Patchwork. Only land borders count. Overseas territories such as French Guiana are not counted as part of their parent country, but exclaves such as Kaliningrad are. Hong Kong is mapped as its own entity.

Gibraltar and Hong Kong are listed because they are mapped as separate territories in our data, though neither is a sovereign country. Saint Martin and Sint Maarten, the French and Dutch halves of a Caribbean island, also border only each other and are left out of the table for the same reason.