Enclaves and Exclaves: Definitions, Baarle, Cooch Behar and Other Border Oddities

Most borders draw a single line between two countries. A small number of places break that pattern: pockets of one country sitting inside another, villages split house by house, and fields that were once foreign territory three layers deep. They are called enclaves and exclaves. The two words are often used as if they meant the same thing, but they don't, and a place can be one, the other or both.

The definitions, precisely

The two terms describe the same piece of land from opposite sides:

• An enclave is territory entirely surrounded by one other state. The word is about the surrounding country.
• An exclave is a part of a state cut off from its main territory by foreign land. The word is about the home country.
• A true enclave can only be reached by passing through the single state that surrounds it. Büsingen am Hochrhein, a German town entirely inside Switzerland, is a true enclave of Switzerland and an exclave of Germany at the same time.
• A pene-exclave (also "practical" or "functional" exclave) is still physically joined to its home country, usually by water, but can conveniently be reached by road only through a neighbor. Point Roberts, at the tip of a peninsula south of Vancouver, is US territory reachable by land only through Canada. Austria's Kleinwalsertal valley is reached by road only from Germany.
• A semi-enclave or semi-exclave would be an enclave or exclave except that it also has a sea coast. Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania, is a semi-exclave.
• A counter-enclave is a piece of the surrounding country trapped inside an enclave. A counter-enclave inside that is a third-order enclave.

The difference matters in practice. Nakhchivan, the autonomous republic of Azerbaijan, is an exclave but not an enclave, because it borders Armenia, Iran and Turkey. Lesotho is an enclave but not an exclave, because it is a whole country, not a detached piece of one. Alaska is separated from the other 48 contiguous states by Canada and has a long coast, so it is at most a semi-exclave. Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish cities on the North African coast bordered only by Morocco, are coastal semi-exclaves of Spain. Neither Alaska nor the two Spanish cities is a pene-exclave, a label that older lists often gave them.

Notable enclaves and exclaves today

Population and area figures come from the Wikipedia article on each territory; where its sources disagree slightly, the table rounds. Beelad's country pages cover sovereign states only, so these territories have no pages of their own, but you can open the parent countries: Azerbaijan, Timor-Leste and Oman.

Baarle: the most complicated border still in use

The Belgian municipality of Baarle-Hertog and the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau share one small town. Baarle-Hertog consists of 22 separate pieces of Belgium completely surrounded by the Netherlands, plus one larger section, Zondereigen, that touches the main Belgian border. Inside those Belgian pieces sit 8 Dutch counter-enclaves, seven within Belgian enclaves and one more near the Belgian mainland. That makes 30 enclave pieces in one town. The pattern goes back to medieval land deals between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant, which the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht confirmed instead of tidying up.

The border is painted on pavements with white crosses, and it runs through shops and homes. In one case it passes through the middle of a front door, so the house has two street numbers, one in each municipality. Both countries are in the Schengen area and the EU customs union, so crossing is invisible in daily life.

Cooch Behar: the record holder, resolved in 2015

Until 2015 the India–Bangladesh border had the largest cluster of enclaves anywhere, left over from land deals between the princely state of Cooch Behar and the Mughal-era district of Rangpur. Bangladesh contained 102 Indian enclaves. Inside them were 21 Bangladeshi counter-enclaves, and one of those held an Indian third-order enclave, Dahala Khagrabari, the only one in the world. India in turn contained 71 Bangladeshi enclaves, with 3 Indian counter-enclaves inside them.

Residents of the enclaves lived for decades without police, schools or, often, valid documents, because reaching their own country meant crossing a foreign border. The fix was a Land Boundary Agreement signed on 16 May 1974. India ratified it only after its 100th constitutional amendment in May 2015, and the two governments exchanged the instruments in Dhaka on 6 June 2015. The swap took effect at midnight on 31 July 2015, and the new citizenships applied from 1 August.

The survivor, Dahagram–Angarpota, is a Bangladeshi enclave of 25.95 km² with about 20,000 residents. At its closest point it is only 178 meters from mainland Bangladesh. The gap is bridged by the Tin Bigha Corridor, an 85-meter-wide strip of Indian land leased to Bangladesh in perpetuity.

Exclaves that shape politics

Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad Oblast was the northern half of German East Prussia until 1945. It is now Russia's westernmost region, home to 1,029,966 people at the 2021 census and to Russia's Baltic Fleet, whose port there stays ice-free in winter. Since Lithuania and Poland joined the EU, Russians traveling overland between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia must cross EU territory, and since 2022 EU sanctions have restricted which goods can move through Lithuania.

Nakhchivan

Nakhchivan (5,502 km²) is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by Armenia's southern Syunik province. At a White House meeting on 8 August 2025, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed in principle on a transit route across Armenia, named the "Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity" (TRIPP), to link the two parts of Azerbaijan. Its operating details were still being worked out.

Oecusse and Musandam

Oecusse is Timor-Leste's exclave on the north coast of Indonesian West Timor, and the country's only special administrative region, with its seat at Pante Macassar. Oman's Musandam Peninsula, which faces the Strait of Hormuz, is cut off from the rest of Oman by the United Arab Emirates. Between them lies Madha, a 93 km² Omani enclave inside the UAE, which itself surrounds Nahwa, a small village that belongs to the emirate of Sharjah.

Countries that are enclaves

Only three sovereign states are entirely surrounded by a single other country. Figures below are from Beelad's country pages (population: UN estimate for 1 July 2023).

Lesotho is the only one of the three that is not tiny: at 30,355 km² it is almost exactly the size of Belgium (30,528 km²), and its entire territory lies above 1,000 meters. For more on the two Italian enclaves, see our guide to the smallest countries in the world.

Key takeaways

• Enclave describes the surrounding country; exclave describes the home country. Büsingen is both; Lesotho is only an enclave; Nakhchivan is only an exclave.
• Places with a sea coast, such as Kaliningrad, Ceuta, Melilla and Alaska, are semi-exclaves, not true enclaves or pene-exclaves.
• Belgium's Baarle-Hertog, with 22 enclaves and 8 Dutch counter-enclaves, is the most fragmented border still in place.
• The India–Bangladesh exchange of 31 July 2015 removed all but one enclave in the region, including the world's only third-order enclave.
• Enclaves and exclaves are not separate countries. For borders at sea, read our guide to maritime borders; for self-governing territories, see dependent and autonomous territories.