Back

2/ The Kingdom of Belgium has 3 official languages: Dutch, French, German. The country's linguistic diversity leads to a complex internal organisation, and many places have multiple names

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communities,_regions,_and_language_areas_of_Belgium

3/ The capital of Belgium is Brussels - Bruxelles (fr), Brussel (nl), Brüssel (de), and it is also the administrative center of the European Union , and thus is often referred to as the “the capital of the EU”

4/ So far so good, but what makes Belgium “geoweird"? First of all, as covered a few weeks ago in our thread about enclaves and exclaves, there is the Belgian territory of Baarle-Hertog, an enclave in the Netherlands , possibly the most famous enclave.

#geoweirdness

https://en.osm.town/@opencage/109812601801317291

5/ Possibly even stranger though is the Belgian / German border.

Over the years and many wars the border has been adapted many times, leading to the truly bizarre case of tiny strip of Belgian land (once a railway, now a cycle path) that goes through Germany

#geoweirdness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vennbahn

6/ From 1816 until 1920 there was a tiny (3,5 km²), wedge-shaped, neutral territory between Belgium and Germany known as Neutral Moresnet, and there was an attempt to make it the world's first Esperanto‑speaking state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet

The last surviving citizen of Neutral Moresnet died in 2020 at the age of 105.

7/ These days border changes are a more friendly affair. A few years ago Belgium gave the Netherlands a chunk of land to simplify the border

#geoweirdness

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/belgium-and-the-netherlands-agree-to-swap-land-to-restore-border

8/ The Belgian border is still sometimes “in flux” - recently a farmer mistakenly moved a French boundary stone thus slightly enlarging the country.

#geoweirdness

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/04/farmer-moves-border-stone-for-tractor-and-makes-belgium-bigger

9/ Belgium has a province named Luxembourg like the neighbouring country Luxembourg and a province named Limburg, just like the province Limburg in neighbouring Netherlands .

10/ Final bit of Belgian #geoweirdness is that the Belgian province of Liège looks like a smaller version of the country itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A8ge_Province

11/ We hope you enjoyed our look at the geographic strangeness of the Kingdom of Belgium Thanks for reading (and sharing).

We have more threads about specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc on our blog. Many still on twitter, but over time we are moving them to mastodon. Enjoy.

https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads

Hint: if you liked Belgium you are going to love our look at neighbour France , one of the geoweirdest countries.

https://en.osm.town/@opencage/109930044904649272

12/ One final bonus toot - the Belgian OpenStreetMap community is very active, and doing great work (as you can see in some of the maps we shared).

Learn more by following @osm_be and in our interview with community members from a few years ago:

https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/144645475193/country-profile-openstreetmap-in-belgium