4/ As we covered in our thread about border disputes a few months ago, Spain ๐ช๐ธ and France ๐ซ๐ท share Pheasant Island, an unoccupied island in a river between the countries: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheasant_โฆ
5/ Spain has a few disputed territories. The Olivenza region is claimed by neighboring Portugal ๐ต๐น. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivenza#โฆ
6/ Happily the dispute with Portugal ๐ต๐น is not a source of stress, and there is no trouble between the two EU ๐ช๐บ countries. Farther south you can actually cross the border by zipline, see: limitezero.com/en/
7/ A long running Spanish ๐ช๐ธ border dispute is with the UK ๐ฌ๐ง about who owns Gibraltar ๐ฌ๐ฎ. The situation has been made more complicated by Brexit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_ofโฆ
10/ The communities within Spain have many, often disagreeing, viewpoints. Including even about whether they are part of Spain. A dynamic situation, as most recently seen in 2017 with the unilateral declaration of independence of the Republic of Catalonia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_dโฆ
11/ Final geoweird point: Spainโs 2nd largest city is beautiful Barcelona, one of the top destinations in Europe. Often confusing for tourists, though, is that the city maps do NOT have north ๐งญ at the top.
12/ We hope you enjoyed our look at the geoweirdness of Spain ๐ช๐ธ. We have more about border disputes, exclaves, geocoding, etc listed on our blog: blog.opencagedata.com/post/geothreadโฆ More countries and regions in the coming weeks and months
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Time to celebrate. ๐ฅณ We hit a nice milestone last week when @theHyphyDude submitted a pull request on our address-formatting project. The PR added a link to a #golang project that uses our templates.
2/ Here's the problem: addresses all over the world are different. Different countries do things differently, and sometimes there are even differences within countries.
3/ Meanwhile the global OpenStreetMap community is continually collecting all kinds of data about the world, which is great. ๐ช๐บ๏ธ This can go to intense detail: every tree, park bench, foot path, etc. That's great, but ...
In this weekโs geo weirdness thread we return to Europe to take a look at Belgium ๐ง๐ช
๐งต๐โ๏ธ
2/ The Kingdom of Belgium has 3 official languages: Dutch, French, German. The country's linguistic diversity leads to a complex internal organization en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitiโฆ and many places have multiple names
3/ The capital of Belgium ๐ง๐ช is Brussels - Bruxelles (fr), Brussel (nl), Brรผssel (de), and it is also the administrative center of the European Union ๐ช๐บ, and thus is often referred to as the โthe capital of the EUโ
1/ To mix things up a bit on this site, we thought we'd experiment with using Fridays to post the occasional thread about geo topics we're often asked about. Today we'll start with one everyone thinks is simple, but really isn't: reverse geocoding ๐งต๐บ๏ธโฌ ๏ธ
2/ Reverse geocoding is turning coordinates (lat,lng) into location info. So 51.952659, 7.632473 becomes "Friedrich-Ebert-Straรe 7, 48153 Mรผnster, Germany" (OpenCage HQ, as you can see on our demo page). So far, so simple, right? opencagedata.com/demo
3/ First question people ask is "why would I ever need that?" Well, main reason is tracking devices (GPS, etc) capture locations very precisely as coordinates. But one big problem - coords make no sense to humans ... ๐๐ค๐ค๐ค