Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
Outside the Walls, in Wood, Within a Year
In 1681 the Hungarian diet at Sopron told Protestants where they could build, what they could build with, and how long they had. The buildings that came out of those restrictions are the largest timber structures anyone in the region had attempted, and five of them are still standing in Slovakia.
What the Iron Gates Cost
A dam agreed in 1963 made the most dangerous stretch of the Danube navigable and produced about 2,100 megawatts, and it drowned an inhabited Turkish island to do it. The engineers cut a Roman inscription out of the cliff and raised it above the new water line; they did not save the island.
The Veto in the Forest
Białowieża is the last stretch of lowland forest in Europe that has never been cleared, and only about a sixth of the Polish side of it is national park. The argument over the rest has run through a bark beetle, a European court and a border wall, and it keeps coming back to a clause in Polish law that hands the decision to six local councils.
The Road That Floats
In 2003 the Philippines stopped treating the sea as the place its road network ended, and rebuilt the national highway out of ferry ramps. It was the cheapest transport infrastructure an archipelago of 7,641 islands could put up, and cheapness turned out to be the achievement and the risk in the same object.
The Dyke That Moved Backwards
For a thousand years the Dutch answer to a river was a higher wall. Between 2007 and 2019 the state spent about €2.3 billion moving dykes backwards, demolishing the houses behind them and handing whole polders to the water instead.
The Grass Nobody Owns
Mongolia handed its collectivised livestock to herding households between 1991 and 1993 and left the pasture in state ownership, where the constitution still keeps it. The national herd has climbed from about twenty-six million animals to more than seventy, and every few years a winter kills them by the million — ten million in 2010 alone, close to a fifth of everything alive.
The Second Signature
Malaysia signed a contract for a 688-kilometre railway across the peninsula in 2016, suspended it in 2018, and signed a cheaper version of the same project in 2019. The published difference between those numbers is the clearest public account anyone has of what a piece of Belt and Road infrastructure is actually worth.
Build, Operate, Transfer
Seven dams now stand on the Nam Ou, built as a single project under a single concession covering the whole river. Laos did not finance them and does not own them yet — which is the point of the arrangement, and also the problem.
The Mine Above the Lake
Kumtor is an open pit at four thousand metres in the central Tian Shan, worked in permafrost and moving ice, and for most of this century it has been the largest single item in the Kyrgyz economy. The state seized it from its Canadian operator in 2021 and a settlement in 2022 left it owning the mine outright, which answered the question of who owns it and none of the questions about where its water goes.
A Four Followed by Twenty-Nine Zeros
In July 1946 prices in Hungary doubled roughly every fifteen hours, the fastest inflation ever recorded anywhere. It was stopped on a single morning in August by a new currency, the forint, and that is still what Budapest prices in today.
The Three-Month Ticket That Stayed
In June 2022 Germany sold three months of unlimited local travel for nine euros a month, as emergency relief against energy prices. It was supposed to end in August, and instead it became permanent policy that the federal government and the states renegotiate every autumn.
Forty-Two Thousand Trees
About 42,000 plane trees lined the Canal du Midi, and a fungus that reached Europe in a wartime packing crate is killing every one of them. The replanting is deliberately mixed, because the avenue's beauty and its vulnerability were the same fact.
The Seal That Needs a Shovel
The Saimaa ringed seal has lived in one Finnish lake since the land rose and cut that lake off from the sea, and by the early 1980s there were fewer than two hundred left. It is recovering now under a fishing closure that costs local households real money, and in warm winters its pups are born in snowbanks that volunteers build by hand.
The Burning Stone
For most of a century Estonia ran its electricity on a rock that barely burns, which gave it the dirtiest power in the European Union and the least dependence on anybody else's fuel. Both halves of that sentence are now being unwound in one county in the north-east, and you can go and stand in it.
Nobody Is Allowed to Profit From Your Radiator
Roughly two thirds of Danish homes are heated by hot water piped in from a plant on the edge of town, and by law the company sending it is forbidden to make a profit. The rule was written into a statute passed in 1979, in the middle of an oil panic, and it explains both why Danish towns have almost no chimneys and why the same flat can cost several times more to heat in one town than in the next.
The Valley That Named the Dollar
One valley in the Ore Mountains produced the silver coin that named the dollar, the pitchblende that gave Marie Curie her radium, and the uranium that the Soviet weapons programme wanted badly enough to staff the mines with political prisoners. The spa that opened in 1906 to sell the radioactivity is still open, and still pumping from a shaft sunk in 1518.
Nine Kilometres of Somebody Else's Coast
In 1699 the Republic of Ragusa gave away a strip of its own coastline to the Ottoman Empire deliberately, to put a foreign army between itself and Venice. Three centuries later Croatia spent European money on a 2.4-kilometre bridge to get around what is left of it.
The Reversal Is the Fishery
Once a year the Tonlé Sap river stops, turns around and runs backwards for four months, and the lake it feeds grows about six times larger. That reversal is what produces one of the largest freshwater fisheries on earth, and it has been arriving late, low and short.
The Reactor That Was Never Switched On
Austria finished a 692-megawatt nuclear power station on the Danube, then voted by about thirty thousand votes not to start it. Half a century later the building is still there, still complete, and the ban has been written into the constitution.
A Programme That Began as a Room Shortage
Korea opened its Buddhist temples to overnight visitors in 2002 because the World Cup had left the country short of hotel beds. Two million stays later it is the best cultural programme the country runs.
The Room Is Not the Business
You can walk to 4,130 metres in Nepal with a daypack, sleeping in a bed and eating hot food every night. The teahouse system that makes it possible was never planned — and roads are now unmaking it.
The Eight Weeks Nobody Mentions
Every spring the air in Chiang Mai becomes some of the worst on earth, and almost no itinerary says so. The cause is not industry or traffic — it is maize stubble on hillsides too steep for machinery.
Our Like Will Not Be Seen Again
A community of never more than 150 people on an island off Kerry produced three books still in print seventy years later — and was evacuated by the state in 1953 because there was no way to reach a doctor.
The Country That Runs on a Clock
In 1982 Switzerland stopped designing timetables around trains and started designing them around connections — then dug tunnels through the Alps to make the arithmetic work.
Bridges Built to Be Destroyed
Iceland's ring road was only completed in 1974, across a black desert crossed by a river that appears once a generation carrying more water than the Amazon. The bridges were designed to fail.
The Oldest Line on a Map
The Douro was demarcated in 1756 — the first wine region in the world with legal boundaries — and the reason was fraud. Some of the original stone markers are still standing in the vineyards.
The Barren Line
Greek ferries are not a tourist product that also carries locals. They are a public transport network serving a hundred inhabited islands — and the August crowd is what pays for the February sailing.
The City Italy Was Ashamed Of
In 1952 Italy emptied the cave districts of Matera by law, calling them a national disgrace. In 1993 UNESCO listed them. Today a night in one costs more than a night in Rome — and people are alive who saw both.
The Water Under Marrakech
Marrakech was built on 700 kilometres of khettara — hand-dug tunnels carrying Atlas groundwater to the city by gravity, incapable of over-extracting because they had no pumps. The motor well replaced them in a generation, and the aquifer has been falling ever since.
A Thousand Years of Dried Cod
Cod split and hung on timber racks in Lofoten, dried in cold Atlantic air without salt, and shipped to Venice and Vicenza — a trade documented since the twelfth century and still running on the same islands, the same fish and the same wind.
The Delta Is Sinking
Seventeen million people, half of Vietnam's rice, and a metre of elevation. The Mekong Delta is subsiding faster than the sea is rising — and the largest single cause is the groundwater being pumped out from underneath it.
The People Who Were Moved Out of Petra
The tombs above the Petra basin have soot on their ceilings from cooking fires. The Bdoul lived in them until the 1985 UNESCO listing moved the tribe to a housing scheme on the ridge — keeping the right to work in the site and losing the right to be in it.
The Road That Refilled the Villages
In 1985, 690 people finished the Camino de Santiago. Last year around half a million did. What that did to a 800-kilometre strip of emptied rural Spain is unlike anything else that has happened to the European countryside in forty years.
Nine Million Empty Houses
Japan has around nine million vacant dwellings and municipalities giving them away. The reasons are a tax code that punishes demolition, a registry that lost track of who owns what, and a population that peaked in 2008 — and one valley that solved it in 1968.
The Country That Made a Copy of Itself
Tuvalu is building a digital replica of its territory, records and culture — not as a stunt but as a legal instrument, designed to keep a 900,000-square-kilometre maritime boundary alive after the land inside it has gone.
Who Owns the Elephant
Namibia wrote community ownership of wildlife into its constitution and then let 86 conservancies act on it. Black rhino and desert elephant numbers recovered on communal farmland with no fences — and the whole arrangement nearly collapsed the year the tourists stopped coming.
A Volcano and Thirty Islands
La Soufrière erupted explosively in 2021, in 1979 and in 1902 — and in 2021 nobody died, because the evacuation came before the explosion. South of it runs a chain of thirty islands, and from this one the Garifuna were deported in 1797 to a coast where their descendants still speak the language.
The Fortress on the Hill
The first English colony in the Caribbean, the mother colony from which the rest were settled, and the last place in the eastern Caribbean to keep a sugar industry running — until 2005. Plus a federation with a secession clause its smaller half very nearly used in 1998.
Nutmeg, Revolution and an Invasion
The only country with a spice on its flag, once second only to Indonesia in nutmeg, until a hurricane destroyed ninety per cent of the trees in a night. Also the only English-speaking Caribbean state to have had a socialist revolution — and to have been invaded four years later.
The Island That Was Evacuated
Hurricane Irma flattened Barbuda in 2017 and the island was evacuated completely — for the first time in roughly three hundred years, nobody lived there. Months later, with residents still displaced, the law that had held Barbudan land communally since emancipation was amended to permit freehold sale.
The Banana Wars
Two of the largest economies on earth spent twenty years litigating at the WTO over the shelf price of fruit. The countries that lost were Windward islands with populations smaller than a European suburb, whose rural economies had been built on a European trade preference that the rulings removed.
The Island That Grew Back
Hurricane Maria crossed Dominica in three hours in 2017 and stripped every leaf from every tree on the island. Two months later its prime minister told the UN the country intended to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation. What that has actually meant, on an island with nine volcanoes and no beaches.
The Coast That Was Never Logged
The largest intact temperate rainforest on earth, a black bear that comes out cream-coloured, and a forest whose trees have been shown to contain nitrogen carried inland from the ocean by animals. How blockades, a market campaign and twenty-six First Nations stopped the clearcutting and built something else instead.
The River That Was Divided Twice
The Colorado was divided between seven states in 1922 on the basis of flow records from an unusually wet decade. A century later it supplies forty million people, irrigates a large share of North America’s winter vegetables, and in most years does not reach the sea. The bathtub ring at Lake Mead is the visible edge of it.
The Island That Wrote the Rules
Barbados industrialised the Atlantic plantation in the 1640s and drafted the legal code that governed it in 1661 — a template adopted almost verbatim in Jamaica, Antigua and South Carolina. In 2021 it removed the British monarch as head of state, and it now argues climate finance at the IMF with a voice its size does not predict.
Seven Hundred Islands and a Bank
Piracy, wrecking, blockade running, rum running, offshore banking, tourism: six industries, one location, five hundred years. An archipelago of limestone with no fresh water and no minerals has spent its whole history monetising its position — and is now among the countries most exposed to sea-level rise on earth.
The Republic That Paid for Its Freedom
In 1804 the enslaved population of a French colony defeated Napoleon’s army and founded the first Black republic in the world. In 1825 France sent a fleet and demanded compensation for the loss of its property — the people themselves — and Haiti paid, at interest, for over a century. This is not a guide; it is an explanation.
The Tables of the Gods
Two-billion-year-old sandstone plateaus standing a kilometre above the savanna, each summit isolated long enough to evolve its own flora, with the highest waterfall on earth dropping off one of them. And a country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world that has produced the largest displacement crisis in the Americas.