Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
A Central Bank That Cannot Print
Montenegro pays for everything in euros and has never been in the euro area, the European Union or any monetary agreement with Brussels. It adopted the Deutsche Mark in November 1999 as an act of separation from Belgrade, inherited the euro when the Mark was withdrawn, and has run a state ever since without the power to issue a banknote.
The Box Marked Others
To stand for the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina you must declare yourself a Bosniak, a Croat or a Serb, and live in the right half of the country. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that unlawful in December 2009, and the constitution — an annex to a peace treaty, drafted in English, never voted on by any Bosnian parliament — has not been amended since.
The Schemes Were the Banking System
By the end of 1996 Albanian pyramid schemes held liabilities the IMF later put at around $1.2 billion — close to half of national output — and something like two-thirds of the population had money in them. When they stopped paying in January 1997 the state went down with them, and the country has spent thirty years explaining why anyone fell for it.
The Line to Apollo
Cahora Bassa dams the Zambezi in Tete province, and for the first thirty-two years of Mozambican independence it was 82 per cent owned by the Portuguese state. Mozambique bought the controlling share in 2007 for US$950 million, and what it had bought was a wall pointed the wrong way.
An Open Question, By Order
The archaeology of Great Zimbabwe was settled in 1906 and settled again, unanswerably, in 1929. What followed was not a scholarly dispute but a state policy requiring the country's own museums to describe the builders as unknown.
The Other Site Was Kafue
In 1955 the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland chose to dam the Zambezi at Kariba rather than the Kafue, a river that runs entirely inside Northern Rhodesia, and the first machine hall went on the southern bank. Zambia has spent the seventy years since building its way out of that decision, and a drought in 2024 showed how much of the job was left.
Eight Permits a Day
Uganda sells eight gorilla permits per habituated group per day and not one more, which caps the entire country's supply at something on the order of two hundred people a morning. Rwanda answered the same constraint in 2017 by doubling its price to 1,500 dollars; Uganda decided not to follow, and the two neighbours have been running opposite experiments on the same animal ever since.
Sixty-Seven Millimetres
Two railways terminate in Dar es Salaam a few kilometres apart and cannot exchange a single wagon, because their rails are sixty-seven millimetres out. That gap is the clearest surviving evidence of what the TAZARA line was built to do, which was never primarily to serve Tanzania.
Four Metres Wide
On 3 October 2003 a channel four metres across was cut through the sand spit that holds the Senegal river off the Atlantic, to stop Saint-Louis flooding. It worked that week, and within twenty years the channel was six kilometres wide and had rewritten the tides, the salt and the map of who lives where.
The Steam Under the Rift
Kenya's electricity used to arrive when it rained, and in a bad year it did not arrive at all. It now comes mostly out of the ground: geothermal supplied 39.5 per cent of everything the country generated in the year to June 2025, more than hydro, wind and everything burned put together.
Four Hundred Dollars a Tonne
Cocoa in Ghana has no market price — a state board announces one figure each October and every farmer in the country is paid it. In 2019 Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire used that monopoly to impose a $400-a-tonne premium on the entire world market, and then spent years watching buyers try to subtract it again somewhere else in the price.
The Carrying Capacity of a Cave
The Mogao Caves outside Dunhuang hold 492 painted chambers cut over a thousand years, and the thing that damages them fastest now is visitors breathing. Since 2014 the site has run to a measured daily limit, with a film standing in for the caves you are not shown and sensors deciding which doors get unlocked.
Stopped at the Kgotla
In the 1980s Botswana's water department proposed dredging the Okavango's outflow river and regulating the delta's floods. The scheme was stopped at a public meeting in Maun on 11 January 1991, and it has never been formally cancelled — only suspended.
The Outflow Is Set by Law
Soviet planners treated Lake Sevan as an inefficiency — water evaporating off a shallow surface instead of turning turbines — and took roughly nineteen metres off it. Armenia has spent the sixty years since digging tunnels to put the water back, and now fixes the lake's annual outflow by an act of parliament.
The Half They Chose to Save
In August 2005 Kazakhstan finished an earth dam across the strait that once joined the two halves of the Aral Sea, and the northern half began to come back within months. It works because it keeps everything the Syr Darya delivers on one side of it, which is also the reason the southern half is not coming back at all.
The Last Compulsory Harvest
For most of its independent history Uzbekistan brought in the cotton harvest with conscripted labour — teachers, nurses and students sent to the fields on a quota handed down from the presidency. In March 2022 the international boycott that had targeted it for well over a decade was called off, because the price mechanism that made the conscription necessary had been dismantled.
Eight Per Cent
A few hundred walkers trespassed on Kinder Scout in 1932 and five went to prison, though not for trespassing. Seventy-three years later England opened about eight per cent of itself to walkers, while Scotland, in the same decade, opened almost all of it.
Three Kilometres East
Kiruna is being demolished and rebuilt three kilometres east of itself, because the iron ore the town exists to mine leans in underneath the streets and the mine is following it down. The company doing the digging is owned by the state and is paying for the move, which is the only reason anybody agreed to it.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 Country That Struck Oil
A 226-metre waterfall with no railing and nobody watching. Eighty-five per cent forest cover and one of the lowest deforestation rates on earth. And, since 2015, several billion barrels of oil off the coast that have made this the fastest-growing economy in the world. All three are now true at once.
The Fruit That Named a Word
The phrase banana republic was coined about Honduras by a writer hiding from an embezzlement charge. The companies built the railways the country could not afford and took concessions in return — and the rails ran to the sea, not between Honduran cities. What that did to the map is still visible.
The Language That Won
Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where an Indigenous language is spoken by the majority — including by people with no Indigenous ancestry — as ordinary daily life. How Guaraní survived the conquest, and why two catastrophic wars left it stronger than they found it.
The Canal That Never Came
Nature had already built most of a transoceanic canal across Nicaragua, and for two centuries the country was told it was about to be transformed by one. A volcano on a postage stamp sent the Americans to Panama; the 2013 Chinese concession broke ground and then evaporated. Nothing was ever built.
The Cut That Runs on Rain
A French failure, an engineered independence, and a handover Washington predicted would be a disaster and which turned out to be the reason the canal still works. Now the waterway faces the one problem no engineer designed for: every ship that transits drinks the same fresh water the country does.
Slow Fire
Mezcal went from regional spirit with a bad reputation to one of the fastest-growing categories in global drinks. The agave it is made from takes eight years to mature, and twenty-five for the wild varieties — which is the entire problem, written in a plant that flowers once and dies.