Borneo

Straddling the equator in the heart of Southeast Asia lies one of the planet's great wild places. Borneo is the third-largest island on Earth and the only one divided among three countries, its dense rainforests sheltering orangutans, pygmy elephants and thousands of species found nowhere else. Beneath the jungle canopy run some of the oldest tropical forests in existence, far older than the Amazon, threaded by mighty rivers and broken by limestone caves among the largest in the world.

Borneo covers about 743,330 square kilometres and is split between Indonesia, which holds the southern two-thirds as Kalimantan, Malaysia, whose states of Sabah and Sarawak occupy the north, and the small oil-rich sultanate of Brunei. Its highest point is Mount Kinabalu, rising to 4,095 metres in Sabah, one of the tallest peaks in Southeast Asia and a biodiversity hotspot in its own right. The island's interior is mountainous and rugged, its lowlands once blanketed by peat swamp and dipterocarp forest, its coasts fringed with mangroves. The vast Mahakam and Kapuas rivers drain its heartland.

For centuries Borneo was the realm of Dayak peoples, river-dwelling communities famed for longhouses and, historically, headhunting, alongside coastal Malay sultanates grown rich on trade. The island's rainforests have suffered some of the fastest deforestation on Earth, cleared for palm oil, timber and mining, threatening the orangutan with extinction in the wild. Indonesia is now building a new national capital, Nusantara, in Kalimantan, a move that places Borneo at the centre of the country's future even as conservationists race to save what remains of its irreplaceable forests.

• Asia
  Earth's largest and most populous continent located on
• Brunei
  An oil-rich sultanate on the rainforest coast of Borneo shared by
• Indonesia
  The world's largest archipelago, spanning two oceans shared by
• Malaysia
  Two coasts of a peninsula and a slice of Borneo shared by