Andorra

A country in the Pyrenees with two heads of state, one of them a French president and the other a Spanish bishop. The arrangement dates from 1278, when a dispute between the Bishop of Urgell and a French count was settled by making them joint sovereigns, and the co-principality has survived every change of regime on both sides - the French share passed from counts to kings to the republic, so the president of France is now a prince of Andorra by inheritance from Henry IV. The country paid a symbolic tribute to each co-prince in alternate years for centuries. It stayed neutral in the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, and a widely repeated story that it remained technically at war with Germany from 1914 to 1958 appears to be untrue. Smuggling across the mountains was a mainstay of the economy before tax-free shopping and skiing replaced it. Andorra adopted a written constitution only in 1993, becoming a parliamentary democracy and joining the United Nations. Catalan is the official language, the only country where it is. There is no army and no airport. The country has about 80 thousand people on 468 square kilometres. Its capital, Andorra la Vella, is the highest capital in Europe. Around ten million visitors come each year, mostly for skiing and shopping. Life expectancy is among the highest in the world. Madriu-Perafita-Claror, a glacial valley, is a World Heritage site covering about a tenth of the country. Andorra has no central bank and used the French franc and Spanish peseta before the euro.

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