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:
Continue reading Three Small Countries – Part 3 (Liechtenstein)
