Andorra
A tiny Pyrenean principality of ski slopes and duty-free valleys
Andorra is a microstate tucked high in the eastern Pyrenees between France and Spain, a country of steep valleys, ski resorts, and stone villages clinging to the mountainsides. With only about 89,000 people and the highest capital in Europe, Andorra la Vella, sitting above a thousand meters, it is among the world's smallest and least populous nations. A duty-free shopping haven and winter-sports destination, it preserves a singular political curiosity: it is a co-principality ruled jointly by two heads of state, one of them a French president and the other a Spanish bishop.
The entire country lies within the Pyrenees, a knot of glaciated valleys and ridges rising to Pic de Coma Pedrosa at 2,946 meters. Mountain streams feed the Valira river, which drains southward into Spain. The high alpine terrain leaves little arable land, so tobacco cultivation and pasturage have historically given way to tourism, which now anchors the economy alongside banking. A mountain climate brings cold, snowy winters that sustain the ski industry and mild summers that draw hikers to the peaks.
Tradition holds that Charlemagne granted the Andorrans a charter for resisting the Moors, and the co-principality dates to a thirteenth-century settlement between the Count of Foix and the Bishop of Urgell. Andorra remained a feudal relic into the modern age, adopting a written constitution and parliamentary democracy only in 1993, the same year it joined the United Nations. Catalan is the sole official language, reflecting deep cultural ties to neighboring Catalonia, and the country uses the euro despite not being an EU member.