Enclaves ·
Three countries that live entirely inside another
Lesotho, San Marino and Vatican City each have exactly one neighbor, and it surrounds them completely.
Being next to a big neighbor is common. Being completely inside one is not. Our country files, built from Natural Earth's boundaries, find exactly three countries whose only land neighbor surrounds them on every side.
Lesotho
Lesotho covers 30,360 km² and is home to 2.4 million people (World Bank, 2025), the largest of the three by far. It is also the only one of the three that isn't a city-state. The whole country sits high in the Maloti and Drakensberg mountains, and it has the highest lowest point of any country: about 1,400 metres above sea level.
San Marino
San Marino is a 61 km² republic on the slopes of Monte Titano in northern Italy, with 34,109 people. It claims to be the world's oldest surviving republic, with a traditional founding date of 301 AD.
Vatican City
Vatican City is the smallest country in the world, at about 0.44 km² inside Rome. Its border with Italy is marked partly by walls and partly by a line across St. Peter's Square.
Why so few?
An enclosed country depends on its neighbor for every road, rail line and trade route to the sea, which is rarely a comfortable position. The three that exist survived for very specific historical reasons: a mountain kingdom that became a British protectorate rather than part of South Africa, a hilltop republic that outlasted the unification of Italy, and the 1929 Lateran Treaty that created the Vatican.