Andorra

Seven centuries of survival in the high Pyrenees, ruled by two princes and never conquered.

Andorra is one of Europe's oldest surviving states, a cluster of valleys high in the eastern Pyrenees that has outlasted empires by belonging, in a sense, to no one. Legend traces its origin to Charlemagne, who is said to have granted the valleys their charter after his armies passed through against the Moors, a memory still sung in the national anthem 'El Gran Carlemany'. Its real political identity was forged in 1278, when a long feudal quarrel between the Bishop of Urgell and the Count of Foix was settled by a charter, the paréage, that placed Andorra under their joint suzerainty. From that compromise grew a unique co-principality whose two heads of state today are the President of the French Republic and the Bishop of Urgell, a Spanish prelate. For more than seven hundred years this divided overlordship, together with the country's isolation and a symbolic annual tribute, preserved Andorran neutrality and self-government through Europe's wars. In 1993 Andorra adopted its first written constitution, becoming a sovereign parliamentary democracy with the co-princes reduced to constitutional heads of state, and that same year it joined the United Nations.