Curated category
Capital cities in Europe
- BernBern sits at the heart of Switzerland, and yet it refuses the word "capital." The Swiss constitution designates it not as the nation's capital but as the…
- LisbonLisbon is the only European capital older than every modern rival but one, and that one is Athens. Pre-Celtic tribes settled it.
- VilniusVilnius carries a name that comes from a river: the Vilnia, a small tributary meaning "ripple," which flows into the Neris at the heart of the old city.
- BucharestBucharest was first written into the historical record in 1459, when a document named a place called the 'Citadel of București' and linked it to the ruler of…
- ViennaVienna sits at the edge of two worlds. To the west rise the Vienna Woods, the northeasternmost foothills of the Alps. To the east, the land flattens into the…
- BelgradeBelgrade sits where the Sava and Danube rivers meet, and that single geographic fact has determined nearly everything about it.
- ReykjavíkReykjavík sits at 64 degrees north, making it the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state. That single fact contains a puzzle: how did a city at…
- AthensPindar called it iostephanoi Athanai, the city of the violet crown. Athenians once pinned golden cicadas in their hair, calling themselves cicada-wearers, a…
- WarsawWarsaw has died and come back to life. That is not a metaphor. On the 17th of January 1945, Soviet and Polish troops entered what remained of the city and…
- MoscowMoscow holds the second-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, tied with Hong Kong. It stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, the…
- LondonLondon stands on the River Thames at the head of a tidal estuary that runs 50 miles down to the North Sea. It has been a major settlement for nearly 2,000…
- ParisParis holds 2.04 million people in just 105.4 square kilometres of land. Around that core, a metropolitan population of 13.2 million spreads across the Seine…
- PraguePrague stands on the Vltava River, its skyline so dense with steeples that a 19th-century mathematician named Bernard Bolzano counted them and arrived at a…
- StockholmStockholm sits at the precise spot where the freshwater of Lake Malaren spills into the Baltic Sea, spread across fourteen islands that give the city a…
- MadridMadrid sits at the geographic heart of the Iberian Peninsula, roughly 660 metres above sea level, making it the second-highest capital city in Europe. Over 3.
- KyivKyiv has stood on the banks of the Dnieper River for at least fifteen centuries, and during that time it has been sacked, burned, rebuilt, conquered, and…
- AmsterdamAmsterdam sits about two meters below sea level, a city built on peat that should never have existed. Its very name is a confession of its origins: a dam on…
- RomeRome is the only city on earth that contains another sovereign nation entirely within its borders. Vatican City, the smallest country in the world, sits…