It doesn’t take long to get from Paris to Brussels. An hour and a half on a comfortable Thalys train will get you there.
Which raises an intriguing question, if you like that sort of thing: wich capital cities of neighbouring countries are the closest together? And which are the furthest away?
There are some that one might think would be quite close, which are actually much further part.
Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, sits on one side of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, while Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital lies on the other side.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
But at 207km apart, they’re not really that close at all.
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Similarly, Singapore – capital of, er, Singapore – always sticks in the mind as ‘that bit on the end of the Malaysian sticky-out bit’. But it’s actually pretty far away from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. A whole 319km away, in fact:
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Thinking of ‘countries that cause problems by being close together’, you inevitably think of South Korea and North Korea.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
And while Pyongyang in the North and Seoul in the South are pretty close together, 181km just isn’t going to cut it.
Time to do some Seoul-searching to find the real answer here.
(Sorry.)
(Okay, not that sorry.)
Another place where countries being close together tends to cause problems is the Middle East. Damascus, the capital of Syria, really isn’t that far from Beirut, in Lebanon. Just 76km:
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Seeing as Lebanon is currently host to millions of refugees fleeing the horrors of Syria’s never-ending civil war and the atrocities of Daesh, or Isis, this is presumably something that authorities in Beirut have given a certain amount of thought to.
Most of the time, finding nearby capitals is a game of searching out which bits of the world have lots of small countries, and then rooting around. So you’d think Central America would be ripe for close-together capital fun.
And yet the best option is Guatemala and El Salvador – where the imaginatively named Guatemala City is a whole 179km away from the also imaginatively named San Salvador.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Another obvious place with lots of small-ish countries is Europe – the site of the pair of capitals that drove me to write this nonsense in the first place.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
And in fairness, Vienna and Bratislava do make a pretty good showing of it. Austria’s capital sits on the Danube; drift downstream, and you swiftly get to Slovakia’s capital. As the crow flies, it’s 56km – though as the man swims, it’s a little longer.
There are more surprising entries – particularly if you’re willing to bend the rules a little bit. Bahrain and Qatar aren’t really adjacent in the traditional sense, as they have no land border, but let’s just go with it.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Manama, Bahrain’s capital, is 140km away from Doha, the centre of the world’s thriving local connecting-flight-industry which moonlights as Qatar’s capital.
Sticking with the maritime theme, Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago is 152km from St George’s, Grenada.
Good, but not good enough.
Castries, the capital of the Carribbean country of St Lucia, is 102km north of Kingstown, the capital of St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Better, but still not good enough.
Basseterre, the capital of St Kitts and Nevis, inches ahead at 100km away from St John’s, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
But, enough teasing: it’s time to get down to the big beasts.
If you ask Google Maps to tell you the distance between the capital of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it comes up with a rather suspect 20km.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
A short distance, but considering the only thing separating the two is the River Congo, something’s up: Google places the centre of Brazzaville a little north of where it should be, and the centre of Kinshasa many many miles south of where it should be, in some sort of suburb.
So, in true CityMetric style, we turn to train stations.
Though such transport hubs may not always perfectly mark the centre of a city – just ask London Oxford Airport or London Paddington – in this case it seems about right.
Kinshasa’s main train station is helpfully called ‘Gare Centrale’, and is almost slap-bang in the middle of the area Google marks as ‘Centre Ville’. On the other side of the river, ‘Gare de Brazzaville’ is in the middle of lots of densely-packed buildings, and is right next to a Basilica, which is always a good sign.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
And when marking that distance, you get a more realistic 4.8km. If you want to be really keen, the ferry between them travels 3.99km, and the closest point I could find between actual buildings was 1.74km, though admittedly that’s in a more suburban area.
Pretty close, though.
But! I can hear the inevitable cries clamouring for an end to this. So, time to give the people what they want.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
If you ask Google Maps to tell you how far away the Holy See, capital of the Vatican, is from Rome, capital of Rome, it says 3.5km.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
If you set the centre of Rome to be the Palatine Hill, the ancient marking point for roads leading out of Rome, that narrows to 2.6km.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Fiddle a bit and put the centre of the Vatican as, well, the middle bit of the roughly-circular Vatican, that opens up a smidge to 2.75km.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
Though obviously in practice Rome and the Vatican are as far away as one single step over the railings at the entrance of St Peter’s Square, which fairly blatantly makes them the closest capital cities in the world.
But that would have been a very boring thing to come out and say at the start.
Oh, and if you hadn’t worked it out already, the longest distance between a capital city and the capital of a country it shares a land border with is 6,395km.
Click to expand: Image: Google Maps
I know it’s tough for you, Vladimir and Kim. Long-distance relationships are a real struggle sometimes.
I can’t make a pun work on either Moscow or Pyongyang here, but readers’ submissions more than welcome.
2019 update: Someone has pointed out that the distance between Brasilia and Paris is actually longer at, 8,725km. That sort of counts because Brazil borders French Guiana, which is technically a department of France. Hmm. Ish. Not really the same though, is it? Anyway.
Jack May is a regular contributor to CityMetric and tweets as @JackO_May.
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