Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
The Wine Is Buried
Georgian wine ferments in clay vessels buried in the cellar floor, the way it has for eight thousand years — a method the Soviet plan had no use for and a Russian embargo accidentally turned into the country’s calling card.
The Reservoir Made of Wind
Uruguay has no oil, no gas and no coal, and for a century its electricity failed whenever the rain did. In about ten years it rebuilt the grid around wind it does not own, using an auction, a state utility and four dams repurposed as a battery.
The Eighty-Five Millimetre Border
Ukraine's railways run on 1,520 mm track and Europe's run on 1,435, and the eighty-five millimetres between them have to be crossed by jacking up every carriage or unloading every wagon. Since the airspace closed in February 2022 that seam has been the country's front door, and what to do about it has quietly become an accession question.
The Order to Put Out the Fire
In 2010, and again in 2022, the president of Turkmenistan ordered the burning gas crater at Darvaza extinguished, and it is still alight. It is also, by an enormous margin, the least significant thing leaking methane in the country.
The Villages People Moved Back Into
UNESCO inscribed the limestone villages of north-west Syria in June 2011, three months after the uprising began, and moved them to the danger list two years later. By then families displaced from Idlib and the Aleppo countryside were living inside them, which is how a conservation problem turned into an argument about what a ruin is for.
The Dam Outlived the Smelter
In 1958 an Alcoa subsidiary agreed to dam the Suriname River, and in exchange for building it kept the dam and the electricity on a seventy-five-year concession. The smelter it was built to run closed in 1999, the refinery in 2015, and on the last night of 2019 the dam changed hands.
The Cataract Under the Lake
The Merowe Dam closed the Fourth Cataract in 2008, roughly doubling Sudan's generating capacity and putting some 170 kilometres (105 mi) of the Nile under water. Archaeologists had spent a century assuming almost nobody had ever lived along that reach, and they were given four seasons to find out how wrong they were.
The Canal That Stopped Halfway
A bucketwheel excavator weighing some 2,300 tonnes cut 240 kilometres of a 360-kilometre canal across the Sudd, and then stopped in 1984 and never moved again. It is still there, and the argument it was built to settle has come back inverted.
The Sanctuary the Law Needed
Sierra Leone has had a wildlife protection act since 1972, but for two decades a confiscated chimpanzee had nowhere at all to go, which is another way of saying the law could not be enforced. The place that fixed it was built by a private citizen in 1995, at the height of the civil war, and the state has been leaning on it ever since.
The Line That Outlived Its Argument
The Baikal–Amur Mainline was begun with prison labour in the 1930s, abandoned, restarted in 1974 as the Soviet Union's last great construction campaign, and finished so late that the state it was built for had stopped existing. For thirty years it was the standard example of an infrastructure project that made no economic sense — and then Europe stopped buying Russian coal, and the only way out was east.
Thirty Billion Tonnes of Wet Ground
Under the flooded forest of northern Congo lies the largest tropical peatland complex on earth, and nobody had measured it until a team went in with a soil auger and started counting. What they found holds roughly three years of the world's fossil fuel emissions, and it stays where it is only for as long as it stays wet.
The Clause That Came Due
Paraguay owns half of the largest hydroelectric plant in the western hemisphere and has never been allowed to sell that half to anyone but Brazil. The financial annex that arranged it was written in 1973 with a fifty-year clock on it, and the clock ran out in 2023.
The Lake That Ate the Highway
On 4 January 2010 a hillside above the village of Attabad slid into the Hunza river, killed about twenty people and dammed the valley, and over the following months a lake rose behind it that drowned some nineteen kilometres of the Karakoram Highway. Pakistan and China decided not to drain it — they tunnelled around it instead, and the road reopened in September 2015 above water that had not existed when it was last driven.
The Monday Convoy
In 2015 Niger criminalised the business its northern capital had run for six centuries — carrying paying passengers across a desert — in exchange for European money and equipment. Eight years later it repealed the law, quashed the convictions, and let the trucks load in the open again.
A Ruin Is Not a Draft
Myanmar put Bagan forward for World Heritage listing in the 1990s and was turned down, because the government rebuilding its temples was inventing the parts that had fallen off. It was finally inscribed in July 2019, after an earthquake had gone through the plain and demonstrated, brick by brick, which of the work was medieval and which was not.
The Gas That Was Never Free
For three decades Russian gas arrived on the left bank of the Nistru, was burned in a Soviet power station there, and came back to the rest of Moldova as electricity no European supplier could undercut. The bill went to a company in Chișinău that never paid it, and on 1 January 2025 it stopped arriving.
The Ore Line and the Ouguiya
In seventeen months between 1973 and 1974 Mauritania walked out of the French monetary zone, invented a currency, and took the iron mine that paid for almost everything the state did. Then it had to defend the railway.
The Trunks That Left Timbuktu
When armed groups took Timbuktu in April 2012, the city's manuscript libraries were private, family-owned and largely uncatalogued. Over the following months something like 350,000 volumes were packed into metal footlockers and moved some nine hundred kilometres south to Bamako — by taxi, by bus and by pirogue, through checkpoints held by the people they were being hidden from.
The Court That Cancelled an Election
On 3 February 2020 five Malawian judges annulled the presidential election their own head of state had won, and ordered the country to vote again. They read the judgment wearing body armour, and four months later the man who had come second was president.
Who Guards Leptis Magna
Libya has five World Heritage sites and all five went onto the danger list in July 2016, but what happened to them since 2011 has varied enormously — a bank vault in Benghazi was cut open and emptied of a hoard excavated at Cyrene in 1917, tombs at Cyrene have been bulldozed for building plots, and Leptis Magna is essentially intact. The difference is not international listing, and it is not state capacity, because for long stretches there was not much of either.
The Fleet That Never Calls
The largest merchant fleet on earth flies the Liberian flag, and almost none of it has ever entered a Liberian port. The registry has been administered from the United States since it was written in 1948, which is why it kept working through fourteen years of civil war — and why what comes home is the argument.
The Treaty Signed Under a Blockade
Lesotho has no coast, no oil and one neighbour. What it also has is rain falling on mountains above 3,000 metres, and since 1998 it has been selling that rain to South Africa through a tunnel driven under the Maloti — under a treaty signed nine months after Pretoria closed the country's borders and a coup removed the government that had refused to sign it.
The Third River
In December 1992 Iraq opened a concrete-lined canal running some 565 kilometres (351 miles) from below Baghdad to the Gulf and called it the Third River. Within a decade satellite imagery showed roughly nine tenths of the Mesopotamian marshes gone — and then, in April 2003, the people who had lived in them went out with diggers and broke the embankments themselves.
What a Kilo of Cashew Buys
More than nine tenths of everything Guinea-Bissau sells abroad is a nut almost nobody in the country eats, and a large share of it is not sold for money at all — it is swapped for imported rice at a rate the government announces each spring. The rice used to be grown here, in fields hacked out of the mangrove by hand.
The Line That Had to Carry More Than Ore
On 11 November 2025 the first iron ore left the Simandou range in south-eastern Guinea and crossed the country to the Atlantic on a railway that had not existed five years earlier. The interesting part is not the ore. It is the conditions Guinea attached to the track.
No Injury Required
On 11 November 2019 The Gambia — 11,300 square kilometres, fewer than three million people, less than three years out of a dictatorship — filed a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice. No Gambian had been harmed, and that was precisely the argument: under the Genocide Convention, nobody has to have been.
The Year the Logs Stopped Leaving
On 1 January 2010 Gabon made it illegal to export a log. The country that supplies most of the world's okoumé stopped selling it in the form the world wanted to buy it, and then had to build somewhere to put it.
The Grade Was All You Got
For nine years, Ethiopian coffee could not legally reach a foreign buyer carrying the name of the washing station that made it. The exchange that took the name off was built to stop farmers being cheated, and it worked — which is why undoing it took a second law rather than an apology.
The Horn in the Strongroom
Over four years at the end of the 1980s Eswatini lost the great majority of its rhino, and the law it passed in response is among the strictest in Africa. The horn it has accumulated since sits in a strongroom it is not permitted to sell, and twice this century it has asked the world to change that.
The Rent on a Strait
Djibouti has no oil, no ore and almost no rain, and about a million people live in it. What it sells instead is a position on the Bab el-Mandeb — to Ethiopia by the container, and to four foreign militaries by the year.
The Bridge and the Port
Kinshasa and Brazzaville face each other across about four kilometres of the Congo — the closest pair of capital cities anywhere except Rome and the Vatican — and there is no bridge between them. The reason has never been the river.
The Cut at Vridi
For fifty years Côte d'Ivoire had five hundred kilometres of coast and no harbour on any of it — freight went ashore through the surf. In July 1950 a channel was finally cut through the sandbar at Vridi, and how large the country's largest city became, which of its old towns emptied and which of its beaches are now disappearing all follow from that one decision.
The Park That Followed Its Elephants
Zakouma held more than 4,000 elephants in 2002 and about 450 by 2010, which is roughly ninety per cent gone in eight years. The herd is now back to something near 800, and the decision that turned it around was not a fence or a patrol but the admission that the animals do not stay inside the park.
The Arithmetic at Dzanga Bai
From 1990 a study at one forest clearing in the south-west of the Central African Republic did something nobody had managed for forest elephants: it watched the same individually known animals for long enough to work out how fast they breed. The answer — a first calf at around twenty-three, then one more every five or six years — is why a poached population needs the better part of a century to come back.
A Fence Through the Herd
The European bison was extinct in the wild by 1927, and every animal alive today descends from twelve survivors in zoos. Poland built a steel wall through the forest they were put back into in the first six months of 2022, and the herd on the Belarusian side is now a separate population whether anyone intended that or not.
Ninety-Nine Years, Then Thirty
Portugal granted the concession to build the Benguela railway on 28 November 1902 and wrote it to run for ninety-nine years. It expired to the day, into a country where the line had been cut for a quarter of a century — and the terms Angola wrote for the second concession, in 2022, are pointedly not the terms it inherited.
The First Cargo Went to Canvey Island
In October 1964 a ship loaded liquefied gas at Arzew on the Algerian coast and sailed for the Thames estuary — the first commercial cargo of LNG ever traded between two countries, shipped by a state that had been independent for twenty-seven months. Almost everything Algeria has argued about since runs back to that voyage, including the reason its Roman cities are empty.
Eight Buildings and a Reservoir
In 2020 the reservoir behind the Ilısu Dam closed over Hasankeyf, a town on the Tigris that had been protected under Turkish law since 1978. Eight of its monuments were cut free, driven two kilometres uphill on wheeled platforms and set down in a mown field; the rest of it is under the water.
The Dam That Was Not Built
Latvia dammed its main river three times and drowned the landscape its folk songs are made of, and the one time the public objected out loud, in 1958, it lost. When a fourth dam was proposed in the mid-1980s the objection worked — and the campaign that stopped it became the movement that took the country out of the Soviet Union.
The Carrier That Runs Backwards
Israel’s Water Law of 1959 made every drop of rain that falls on the country public property, and the pipeline built to move it ran one way — from the Sea of Galilee down to the Negev. Sixty years on, most of the country’s drinking water starts in the Mediterranean instead, and the carrier has begun running in the other direction.
The Gardens Keep Their Own Hour
India runs one time zone across nearly thirty degrees of longitude, so the sun is up over Arunachal Pradesh while Gujarat is still nearly two hours from dawn. Assam's tea estates have quietly kept their own clock, one hour ahead, since the British planted them — and the proposal to make that official was rejected on strategic grounds.
The Aquifer Is Not a River
Every oasis in Egypt's Western Desert runs on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, the largest body of fossil groundwater known, most of which fell as rain before anyone farmed anything and which is not being replaced. Egypt has spent seventy years building farms on it, and at the other end of the same desert Siwa is being slowly ruined by water it cannot get rid of.
The Council Nobody Stood For
Belgium's German-speaking Community has about 78,000 people, nine communes and a parliament whose decrees carry the same force as a Flemish one. In 2019 it handed a permanent share of its agenda to twenty-four citizens chosen by lot, which no legislature anywhere had done before.
Ten Million Hand Pumps
From the 1970s, aid agencies and the Bangladeshi government moved a country off pond water and onto hand-pumped tubewells, and deaths from waterborne disease fell steeply. Then, in 1993, the water turned out to contain arsenic — not from any spill, but from the sediment the delta is made of.
The Lake That Runs Both Ways
Lake Ichkeul fills with fresh water down six wadis in winter and drains backwards from the sea in summer, and everything that grows or feeds in it depends on that swing. Three dams built between 1983 and 1994 removed the winter half, and getting it back cost Tunisia a sluice gate, a decade on the World Heritage danger list and a standing annual claim on water the country does not have.
The Land Came Back, the Village Did Not
In 1969 the Makuleke were moved at gunpoint off the triangle between the Luvuvhu and the Limpopo so that it could be added to the Kruger National Park. They won it back in 1998, and then held meetings and decided not to move home.
Taught in Four Hundred Languages
Papua New Guinea has around 840 living languages, more than a tenth of every language alive on earth, in a population of about ten million. In 1995 the state decided to teach its six-year-olds in them, by the early 2000s more than four hundred languages were in use in its classrooms, and in 2013 it stopped.
The River with a Human Face
In March 2017 New Zealand passed a law declaring the Whanganui River a legal person, with all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of one. It ended the longest-running case in the country's legal history, and the argument since has moved from whether a river can hold rights to what those rights are actually able to stop.