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Curated category

Capital cities in Europe

  • 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…
  • 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.