What makes Southern Europe a region

Two peninsulas, and the ground that is on neither

The Iberian peninsula carries Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar at its southern tip and Andorra along the Pyrenean rim. The Italian peninsula carries Italy, San Marino on the Adriatic flank of the Apennines and Vatican City inside Rome. Malta lies south of Sicily. Four members hold a Mediterranean coast, Portugal's coast is Atlantic, and three have no coast at all.

Two of the high points sit outside all of that. Spain's is Teide, 3,715 metres, on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, nearer to the coast of Morocco than to the Iberian mainland. Portugal's is Mount Pico, 2,351 metres, on an island in the Azores some 1,400 kilometres out into the Atlantic. Italy's is Mont Blanc at 4,806 metres, and the summit stands on a boundary read two ways: French survey practice places it inside France, Italian practice places it on the frontier itself. This catalogue records both readings and adjudicates neither.

What Italy encloses

San Marino and Vatican City each record Italy as their only neighbour, and Italy is on every side of both. Gibraltar, Malta and Portugal record a single neighbour as well, which leaves Andorra with two, Spain with five and Italy with seven.

San Marino is governed by its Grand and General Council, with two Captains Regent who take office for six months on 1 April and on 1 October. It was admitted to the United Nations on 2 March 1992, and Monte Titano, the ridge the old town stands on, reaches 756 metres.

Vatican City State was created by the Lateran Treaty signed with Italy on 11 February 1929. The state is not a member of the United Nations; the Holy See has held permanent observer status there since 6 April 1964, and Italian and Latin are both recorded as its languages. Gibraltar, filed here as a dependency, is not a member either. The other six are.

Andorra is not enclosed, but its only land borders run to Spain and to France. Its head of state is shared between two co-princes under an arrangement traced to the pareatges of 1278, its written constitution was approved by referendum on 14 March 1993, and it joined the United Nations on 28 July 1993.

Gibraltar, and the claim on it

Gibraltar was ceded to Britain by Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and Spain has maintained a claim to it since. It has appeared on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories kept by the United Nations since 1946. Two referendums have been put to it: on 10 September 1967, on whether to pass under Spanish sovereignty, and on 7 November 2002, on a proposal for shared British and Spanish sovereignty, which more than 98% of those voting rejected. Gibraltar left the European Union with the United Kingdom on 31 January 2020 and fell outside the Trade and Cooperation Agreement of 24 December 2020, its border arrangements left to a separate negotiation. The catalogue records the administration and the claim, and takes a position on neither.

The euro, and who is in the union

Italy was among the signatories of the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957. Portugal and Spain both acceded to the European Communities on 1 January 1986. Malta joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 and adopted the euro on 1 January 2008.

Andorra, San Marino and Vatican City are in none of it and use the euro anyway. Each holds a monetary agreement with the European Union that allows it to issue euro coins carrying its own national side while standing outside the union; the agreement with Andorra was signed on 30 June 2011 and applied from 1 April 2012. Gibraltar issues the Gibraltar pound, held at parity with sterling.

Languages that do not descend from Latin

Six members take a Romance language as an official one: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan in Andorra, and Italian in Italy, San Marino and Vatican City, where Latin is recorded beside it. The other two do not.

Gibraltar's record gives English. Maltese descends from the Arabic once spoken in Sicily, is written in the Latin alphabet, and became an official language of the European Union when Malta acceded in 2004, which makes it the one Semitic language holding that standing; English is official in Malta alongside it.

Where the edge is argued

The M49 standard published by the UN Statistics Division draws Southern Europe wider than this catalogue does. It files Albania, Greece, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Slovenia in the same subregion as the countries here, and states of its own groupings that they are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning. This catalogue files the first seven of those with the Balkans, on the reading that they sit on the Balkan peninsula rather than the Iberian or the Italian one, and Slovenia with Central Europe, on the reading that an Alpine frontier fits it better than a Mediterranean one. Other schemes cut the line elsewhere again: the CIA World Factbook, as the Wikipedia article on the region records, files Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain as Southwestern Europe and places Albania in Southeastern Europe. Cyprus runs the other way: M49 files it in Western Asia, and the catalogue files it as Eastern Mediterranean.

Both readings are published for every one of those countries, and the difference between them is a decision about where a line falls rather than a measurement anybody took. The membership recorded here is the position this catalogue applies and not a finding about any of the states involved.