(Last Updated on Mar 20, 2024)

Welcome to Part 3 of our series, “Three Small Countries”. We continue our trip in Europe exploring the smallest countries in the world. We’ve already covered the smallest two countries – Vatican City and Monaco. We skip ahead a few spots on the list – number 3 and 4 are the Pacific Islands of Nauru and Tuvalu – hopefully, we will get to visit them in the future. This time, we explore the 6th smallest country in the world – Liechtenstein!

To continue the comparison trend of these countries to other popular places in India, let us pick the city of Mysuru (Mysore) in Karnataka. The beautiful city covers an area of roughly 160 square kilometres and can entirely swallow up the country we are visiting today – Liechtenstein. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you how to pronounce this!

Nestled in between Switzerland and Austria is the double-landlocked country of Liechtenstein (pronounced Lick-tahn-stine). The only other double-landlocked country in the world is Uzbekistan – hope you’ve already read those blogs!

Liechtenstein is a German-speaking country and is considered a “principality” headed by a Prince. The Holy Roman Emperor decreed this as a principality in the year 1719 and named it after the family that owned these lands – the Liechtensteins. After that, is a long and messy power struggle as Europe witnessed two World Wars and multiple changes of power. Liechtenstein was smart to take the route of its neighbour, Switzerland and adopt neutrality – a large reason why it is still an independent nation. 

That much history is good enough to get us started. Let’s dive right into the travelogue:

After exploring Innsbruck, we took our bus to a strange country that I’d never heard of. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name. However, I was sure our Indian guide was saying it wrong – Leech-es-teen. Ugh!

We got there much sooner than I expected thanks to the awesome roads and the fact that there was no stop made at the border. To enter Liechtenstein, the Schengen visa is sufficient and given its close ties with Switzerland and Austria, the country has open borders. It uses the Swiss Franc as its currency. You can easily plan a one-day trip to Liechtenstein from either Switzerland or Austria and the most convenient way to travel would be by road.

We went straight to the capital city of Vaduz. As we entered Vaduz, we could see that it was a tiny city. It was beautiful with mountains on one side! We spotted a castle perched on the side of a hill. Castles seemed to be a prominent feature of this area – we had started seeing them right from Italy to Austria and now, here as well. 

Vaduz has a population of roughly 5000 people and the country was only so wide that even a bicycle was enough to get from one end to the other. The vehicles here had a different style of number plate which did not match the rest of the EU – it had a flag of Liechtenstein on it. 

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The Euro 2016 match between Switzerland and Albania was being screened at the town centre and there was a huge crowd of youngsters – all clad in team jerseys and wrapped in country flags. The atmosphere was feverish.

We walked around exploring the town square and then proceeded to board our toy train which had just arrived. The train took us to an old building with vineyards and showed us a distant view of the castle where the prince lived with his family. The city looked deserted as there was not a single person to be seen on the roads, outside the houses or anywhere! 

A brook flowed through the town and there were small bridges to cross it. We saw the national stadium and the home ground of FC Vaduz – even such a tiny city with hardly any people had amazing sporting facilities.

Finally we saw some people riding an open horse carriage – the kind you see in old movies. They even wore black cloaks and we felt that we were transported to a time in the past. It was an amazing scene as the carriages went around in the fields with the mountains in the background.

The train then entered the cobbled streets which had the lone government-cum-administration building and a huge cathedral. 

As we reached the town centre, we heard something unusual – cars were honking like crazy. We saw that the cars had Swiss and Albanian flags on them and the youngsters were driving drunk and crazy – a glimpse of the football craze in Europe. It kinda spoiled the peaceful vibe of the place.

And so, we ended our short one-day trip to this tiny yet beautiful country and got on our bus. Within minutes, we had entered Swiss territory and continued on our trip.

You can check out Part 1 and 2 of this series here:

• Vatican City
• Monaco

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