Regions of the world
35 regions · 5 continents · 240 countries
A continent is a landmass. A region is a group whose members share a coastline, a currency, an administrator or a treaty, and it is the unit this catalogue files by. Each of the 35 has a page naming what its members share.
35 regions
- AnatoliaThe North Anatolian Fault marks the northern edge of the plate this peninsula rides on, about 1,200 kilometres of it, slipping 20 to 30 millimetres a year and fastest at its western end.
- Arabian PeninsulaYemen covers 455,503 square kilometres at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula.
- AustralasiaAustralia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island have no land borders.
- BalkansBalkan is the Turkish word for one mountain range in Bulgaria, the Stara Planina, which reaches east from the Serbian border to Cape Emine on the Black Sea.
- BalticAdam of Bremen derived the name of the Baltic Sea from balteus, the Latin for a belt, in a chronicle written about 1075.
- CaribbeanTwo land borders run through the islands filed here.
- Central AfricaKinshasa and Brazzaville face each other across the lower Congo.
- Central AmericaThe Central American Volcanic Arc runs down the Pacific side of the isthmus from western Guatemala into Costa Rica.
- Central AsiaThe Amu Darya carries Afghanistan's border with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
- Central EuropeThe protocol that wound up the Warsaw Pact was signed at Prague on 1 July 1991.
- East AfricaSix of the countries here are islands in the Indian Ocean.
- East AsiaThe word Asia is usually traced to a Semitic root for the rising sun.
- Eastern EuropeOn 8 December 1991, in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement recording that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
- Eastern MediterraneanThe Troodos massif at the centre of Cyprus is a slab of ocean floor pushed up onto land, and the copper cut out of it carries the same name as the ground above.
- Horn of AfricaThree tectonic plates pull apart under the Afar Depression.
- LevantWhere the Ottoman provinces ended, two European mandates began.
- MaghrebMaghreb is the Arabic word for the west, the sunset end of the Arab world.
- MelanesiaWho drew the line around these islands? The French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville popularised the name Melanesia in a paper published in 1832, taking it from the skin colour of the islanders while Polynesia and Micronesia were named for their geography.
- MicronesiaKiribati straddles the equator and the 180th meridian.
- Middle EastIn September 1902 a naval strategist writing in a London monthly proposed the Middle East as a name for the sea approaches to the Persian Gulf.
- North AfricaAfter the Atbara joins it in Sudan, the Nile takes in no other tributary before the Mediterranean.
- North AmericaAmerica reached print at Saint-Dié on 25 April 1507, in a small book proposing the name for the land Amerigo Vespucci had described.
- North AtlanticAlthough both are filed under the Americas, neither Bermuda nor Saint Pierre and Miquelon is administered from within it.
- Northern EuropeWhat makes this a region rather than a direction on a map? An assembly, and then a treaty.
- Persian GulfNot one of these states is a republic.
- PolynesiaThe international date line crosses the middle of this group.
- South AmericaEight of the countries filed here take their founding date from the fifteen years between 1810 and 1825.
- South AsiaWho agreed this list? The governments that signed a charter in Dhaka on 8 December 1985 founded the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and its founding membership is the 7 filed here, name for name.
- South AtlanticSaint Helena lies about 1,950 kilometres from the nearest African coast and about 2,900 kilometres from South America.
- South CaucasusArmenia's high point stands well south of the range the region is named after.
- Southeast AsiaLaos has no coastline.
- Southern AfricaOne customs union has held these countries together since 1910.
- Southern EuropeThe highest ground in Spain stands on an Atlantic island closer to the Moroccan coast than to Madrid.
- West AfricaTwo lists run across this region and they do not match: a currency shared by eight of its countries, and a treaty twelve of them signed in 1975.
- Western EuropeThe European Court of Human Rights held on 25 April 1978 that a birching ordered by a juvenile court on the Isle of Man was degrading punishment.
