This European Island Changes Nationality Every Six Months
- Editor OGN Daily
- 15 hours ago
- 2 min read
Pheasant Island, between Spain and France, is one of the world’s last great cartographical quirks.
Roughly 200 metres long and 40 metres wide, the tree covered island sits peacefully in the middle of the Bidasoa River, right on the international border between France and Spain. And this little islet switches nationalities every six months.
Pheasant Island is the smallest cartographical anomaly anywhere in the world. It dates from 1659 when, having sparred for centuries over territory and crowns, the fledgling kingdoms of France - led by Louis XIV - and Spain - led by Philip IV - decided that a firm border between their realms might bring peace. There was nowhere more poignant to formally decree this new frontier than Pheasant Island, from where the Franco-Spanish border now marches east, following the Bidosoa River until, 400 miles later, it flows into the Mediterranean Sea.
Located in the centre of the island, there's a tall stone plinth: the Monument to Peace in the Pyrenees. The French call the island Ile de la Conference, because it is where the treaty was signed in 1659.
The island is not just famous as the site of a war ending peace treaty, it's also remembered as a place of royal wife exchanges. In 1659, Louis XIV met his Spanish wife-to-be, Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV, on the island; and in 1721, Louis XV met Mariana Victoria of Spain for the first time there too.
If you think the story of Pheasant Island is quirky, there is a place (roughly 800 square miles in size) in the flat, empty desert between Sudan and Egypt, that nobody wants. It's the world’s last great remaining Terra Nullius: the only habitable area of land left on the planet that’s not claimed by any sovereign nation-state.